> On the other hand it will also yield alot of low quality programmers, because the higher quality learn to code out of their own interest anyway. So in the end i am not convinced that its a good thing to have even more Rails programmers working for 15$ an hour.
Very few people would argue that by teaching everyone to write, the job of being a professional writer is degraded. What we are saying is that coding is a form of literacy now. We are not advocating that everyone become a professional programmer; and similarly, teaching people to write is not advocating that everyone become a professional writer.
In many jobs knowledge of computational thinking will be important.
I think the objective you're aiming towards would be better served by attempting to raise the bar on mathematical thinking and reasoning. Programming can have a part to play in that, but I'd argue that you'd get much more benefit for equal cost simply by performing studies on which forms of mathematical teaching actually taught students mathematics.
Many kids also hate programming. It's boring, sitting there in front of a screen all the time, typing in incomprehensible text that the computer throws back in your face because you missed a comma here or a semicolon there. There's a huge groupthink bias here in favor of programming as the solution to all problems here at Hacker News because we're all programmers and we tend to frame problems and solutions in a way that makes them amenable to solving via programming.
That's why I suggested that we need to figure out what sort of math education works, rather than suggesting a particular alternative. There is research showing what kinds of mathematical education is effective. I posit that we would be much better off asking for those results to be put into practice everywhere, rather than foisting yet another folklore-based curriculum onto our already overburdened teachers.
Very few people would argue that by teaching everyone to write, the job of being a professional writer is degraded. What we are saying is that coding is a form of literacy now. We are not advocating that everyone become a professional programmer; and similarly, teaching people to write is not advocating that everyone become a professional writer.
In many jobs knowledge of computational thinking will be important.