It kind of depends on what you mean. Leaving aside regulatory frameworks and restrictions on "engineering proper", I believe the underlying question is "can we

It kind of depends on what you mean. Leaving aside regulatory frameworks and restrictions on "engineering proper", I believe the underlying question is "can we expect the average 100 IQ person to be able to write code?". I believe the answer could hypothetically be yes, but you have to attach a lot of strings to that. I don't think it's reasonable to expect anybody to come out of high school with a firm understanding of, say, memory management or OOP principles or computational complexity, but I do believe a bit of "algorithmic thinking", for lack of a better word, could be something valuable to integrate in the average curriculum. It's not less esoteric than Latin or Greek.