I would be very curious how a doctor or nurse could use programming to improve their jobs. Aside from a conduit of fun brain teasers which may have some ancilla

I would be very curious how a doctor or nurse could use programming to improve their jobs. Aside from a conduit of fun brain teasers which may have some ancillary benefit...every doctor and nurse I know spends almost no time in front of a computer except for brief data entry. Actual real "medical" programming occurs by professional engineers in highly regulated environments (and for good reason). Teachers I could possibly see but even then much of this has been optimized away. If you lower the bar of "learning to code" to learning excel I'd tend to agree with you. No reason to hack together a set of python scripts to grade papers, and the actual useful work of generating random test questions, etc has been automated away by software nearly every school uses. The difference between reading, math, and programming is that reading and math are fundamental. Math teaches logical, methodical thinking. Reading teaches the ability to well...read. Programming on the other hand is a higher level abstraction of math. Mathematicians tend to become good programmers. To me, this would imply we simply need to teach more math. It's very simple to say "it should be a basic skill" but there are other, far more fundamental, skills we don't teach either. Why don't we teach machining or woodworking? For the average Joe these two would have infinitely more value both professionally and personally than learning how to fire up a terminal and write a basic python script. The problem that "learn to code" has, and the problem your suggestion has, is that even getting someone to "get" how to code is non-trivial. Once you move beyond the formulaic "here's how to put these pieces together to make a website" suddenly everyone gets lost. I've seen this not only in people I've attempted to mentor, but also being an interviewer at a large tech company regularly seeing code camp graduates coming from fields like teaching, food, etc. These people miss the point of the exact thing you suggest: programming is a conduit for productivity in an underlying field and "learning to code" is a means to an end and not the goal. There certainly are people "cut out to be programmers" and this societal shift to "everyone can be anything they want" has really disenfranchised a lot of people. We never want to talk about it because the idea life is fundamentally unfair is seen as taboo. But it is, and it is the reason code camps produce garbage in 80% of cases and the reason drop out rates in CS programs are so high. The high flying high school kid getting an $XXX,000 salary is an extreme edge cases promoted as a common case. The guy who automates half his job as a data entry clerk was probably fit for professional grade programming anyway. We are guilty of this perpetuation ourselves.