I don't see how learning programming is beyond the ability of a younger child, provided the syllabus and the style of teaching is developmentally appropriate.

I don't see how learning programming is beyond the ability of a younger child, provided the syllabus and the style of teaching is developmentally appropriate. I've seen elementary school kids mess around in Scratch and (without necessarily knowing this is what professionals call these concepts) they are learning about basic program flow, iterators, conditionals, event handlers, Cartesian coordinate systems, etc. Not to mention basic literacy, such as how to type, use the mouse, drawing sprites, recording audio, what it means to "save" versus "save as..." etc. At the end of the day this is literacy, and just like music class doesn't make everybody Mozart, programming class won't make everybody Knuth or Stroustrup. But it's still worth doing because everybody deserves to understand how to think about and interact with the world around them.