I'm not convinced you can learn a language in school. I had to study 4 languages in high school (one of the many down sides to growing up a native speaker of a dying minority language). For years, never mind semesters. I always had decent grades for them too. Two of them are now missing. If you don't get to use a language every day, it just goes away, no matter how hard you studied it in school. I would have been better off taking crash course a month before, if I ever end up needing one of those languages. Or another.
I don't agree that one needs some special innate ability to learn to write code that most people just don't have. Anyone who can learn how to read and write, and is capable of following a recipe for baking a cake, is capable of learning how to understand and write a simple program. Writing instructions in English is not a fundamentally different thing from writing instructions in your favorite programming language. If you do it every day, in an environment where you get feedback from peers, and care enough to learn best practices, most people would probably be able to learn to do it well enough to get paid for doing it. Mind you, I'm not saying everyone has what it takes to be a great computer scientist. This is about programming.
Question is: should you make them? There are already so many required subjects, and this is yet another one that most people wouldn't have any use for throughout their entire lives. Almost everything learned would just fade away within a few years after graduation, leaving nothing but a bad memory of spending endless frustrating hours learning something you couldn't care less about and would never need in your life.
I think a good school should probably offer computer classes for those who are interested. I just don't see the benefit to forcing it down people's throats