In a way they did. in the 1980s, Logo was popularly taught in elementary schools, and while lacking sexps, it was clearly inspired by Lisp in the way it was a functional language in the way the other popular teaching language BASIC clearly wasn't.
Logo may have more potential than it seemed at the time, but as it was presented in my school, there was not much to it, and I never investigated further after turning to BASIC and then compiled languages like Pascal and C.
I certainly agree with the comment that what matters at an early age is what you can do with a language. I wanted to make GUI applications or games, and Java and Javascript hadn't been invented yet.
The point of Logo is not to teach programming but to teach geometry. At least that is what I took from the Paperts Mindstorms book. I never had Logo in school myself.
However if you dig deeper geometry is just the beginning eventual goal is to teach you to simulate movement of insects around light, predator-hunted scenarios etc.
Yeah, I learned Logo in elementary school and it was something that stuck with me until I actually started programming later on in school. I particularly remember having to write a program to navigate a maze, it was a blast!
