Personally, I see value in learning the actual "protocol" that the ORM's are abstracting. For instance, it is convenient to use an ORM if you understand that it

Personally, I see value in learning the actual "protocol" that the ORM's are abstracting. For instance, it is convenient to use an ORM if you understand that it is just a large abstraction of the actual syntax sent to the database server. People learning ORM's before SQL have a disadvantage though, in my opinion. Because without learning the SQL required, they are tied down to their particular ORM implementation. It is kind of like learning jQuery before JavaScript.