We should encourage the use of standard canned libraries (and Boost is almost as standard as they get) whenever possible.
Some people seem to think that beginners should be taught the C side of C++ first, and then introduced to the higher-level stuff later. However, people tend to work as they're trained, so we're going to see a lot of production code written with badly managed raw pointers (well-managed raw pointers are awfully difficult sometimes), arrays (and the inevitable confusion between delete and delete []), and stuff like that. I've worked with code like that. I don't want to do it again any more than I have to.
Start beginners off with the way you want them writing code. This means teaching them about the STL containers and algorithms and some of the Boost libraries at first, so the first thing they think about when needing a group of things is a vector<>. Then teach them the lower-level constructs, so they'll know about them (or where to look them up) when they encounter them, or on the very rare occasions when they need to micro-optimize.
There's basically two types of programmers: the coders, who should be taught languages the way they should be writing them, and the enthusiast, who will learn the low-level stuff, including principles of operating systems, C, assembly code, and so on. Both are well served by learning the language they're going to use up front, while only the enthusiasts will be well served by learning from some arbitrary level of fundamentals.
