There's a significant difference between "learning to code" and "becoming a coder". Kind of like, "learning to write" and "becoming a writer". Much of what is taught is schools isn't realistically thought to have day to day applicability for most professions. Learning how to think and building frameworks for understanding problems is what most schooling does. Another side of the argument is, what valuable things are we avoiding based upon the limited understanding of basics of coding, such as logic, flow, etc? To state that last point another way, what kind of things would we have avoided if understanding of basic arithmetic was missing? We can actually see examples from looking at times and places where it is missing. Coding seems like a natural fit for general education because automation is a general need, and even if you don't really learn anything useful, you should at least have been challenged to improve your method of thinking. At the very least I think it may be a more appropriate context to teach the principles of logic than math, because it's naturally interactive.