Not so long ago at my university, whenever I told someone I was programming in pascal like 70% of students simply did not know what Pascal is, and we are talking about computer science students, so the kind of people you would expect the most to know about this sort of stuff. From my own experience the only people I knew that used pascal where people who once worked with Delphi usually in a professional setting (i.e. by working in a company that used Delphi since D7 or even earlier and sticked to it), or people that used to learn programming in the 2000s or earlier (like me, I first came into contact with Delphi in like 2005ish). As I said, it's not that Pascal has a bad wrap, at least with the new generation of software developers, it is more that these people simply do not know about pascal, except maybe having heard the name once as one of these "ancient" languages (like Cobol or Algol).
In looking at what is taught at schools, you have to be careful not to take the situation of one country (say the USA), and think it is the same for others. Let's remember that the USA is the birth place of Unix (in terms of being built with C), and languages like; C, C++, C#, and Java. These were pushed by huge world reach American companies like AT&T (back then), Microsoft, Sun (before Oracle), etc... So it's no surprise how strong their influence is within the USA.
However, South Africa, for example uses the Delphi dialect in their high schools and colleges. They and many
other countries have a more neutral perspective on programming languages, and
can favor variants of Pascal because of its teaching value and design. South Africa evaluated Java and other languages head to head, then choose Delphi for their high schools.
https://www.techteachers.co.za/page/2/?s=delphi+exam(South African use of the Delphi dialect in their schools)
https://youtu.be/cRLxaBnANQ4 (Teaching programming with Delphi dialect)
Not just South Africa either. Some flavor of Pascal, Turbo Pascal (as free now), Object Pascal (Delphi, Lazarus, PascalABC, etc...) specifically is taught in various school systems throughout the world. An example list: Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Romania, Serbia, Czech, Belgium, Croatia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, Jamaica, Libya, Moldova, Tunisia, Argentina, Costa Rica, Brazil...
Then in support of what is taught in the schools, you have many Pascal/Object Pascal/Delphi websites related to teaching the language. It is definitely a base and situation from which Object Pascal can grow stronger, from school use to more generalized use. This is why I also think an Object Pascal certification program can catch on and increase awareness.
http://pp4s.co.uk/(Pascal Programming For Schools)
More recently, Turkey (2020) did the same thing as South Africa. Evaluated several programming languages for their schools, then chose Delphi over the others. Bought 1 million academic licenses from Embarcadero.
https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2020/01/25/turkey-buys-delphi-licenses-for-an-estimated-one-million-students/