I certainly agree about including physical education, etc.
Perhaps we are the same generation. I am 58. I too have heard for a long time that we would have AI by now. But just because it has taken longer than expected does not mean that it is not coming. Curing cancer has taken far longer than we thought, but I hope we will eventually figure it out - perhaps in the next decade or two, since we now are able to virtual experiments by simulation and manipulate genes a million times more rapidly than we could a decade ago. So I think a cure for cancer is coming, and I think that AI is coming.
But I don't think that human-like AI is needed to write programs: I think that "deep learning" algorithms can do the job: they just need to be trained, and they need a human to guide it. I think that we will see programming teams disappear, replaced by a "learning system operator" of some type. That is probably a decade away, but my assessment of the potential of this class of algorithms, invented in 2006, is that they can write programs. Perhaps I am wrong. If I am right, then we already have the technology - it is just a matter of refining it and training those systems to write code based on descriptions of a problem - the same way that IBM's deep learning system learned to play jeopardy.
Your point is right however, that if we can replace programmers, we can replace a great many jobs. That is in fact the chief concern with these systems. Please see this TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/jerem...
"whatever we do, I want the kids to obtain marketable skills."
Really? By the time those kids are out of college, programming will be obsolete.
You must realize that the computer has it in for you. The irrefutable proof of this is that the computer always does what you tell it to do.