But this isn't true. The selling point of a Commodore 64 for education, said empathically by Jim Butterfield, was that you didn't have to worry about breaking the machine. As soon as computers started coming with hard drives/without the OS burned into ROM, that was not true anymore. It was quite easy to soft-brick a DOS PC by messing with autoexec.bat, and there were legitimate reasons to mess with autoexec.bat!
Conversely, some of the environments kids learn programming in today are very hard to brick. The micro bit, for instance? I'm not sure it can be done, even though you can get very low-level access to it (even bypassing Arm's little RTOS is easy). And of course Java and JavaScript come with sandboxes. Using a computer is pretty damn unsafe, with all the scams and Trojans and pedophiles and whatnot, but playing around with it is back to being fairly safe.
Conversely, some of the environments kids learn programming in today are very hard to brick. The micro bit, for instance? I'm not sure it can be done, even though you can get very low-level access to it (even bypassing Arm's little RTOS is easy). And of course Java and JavaScript come with sandboxes. Using a computer is pretty damn unsafe, with all the scams and Trojans and pedophiles and whatnot, but playing around with it is back to being fairly safe.