Um. We need Economists, Scientists, Marketers, School Guards.... aka all sorts of professions. Only a small subset of professions need coders (I am one of them). People who become coders easily learn it from a toddler on their OWN like the professor in the article and me, (and many others). Its not a key skill for everyone to have, its a skill you are born with. And many coders "so-called" cannot code. Coding is not something we need to teach everyone as a basic skill, its like... lets tech everyone to be an oil well driller from a young age because everyone needs to drill oil wells! We need maybe 200 people on the planet to drill oil wells at most. For coders maybe we need 10 million or so at most (maybe 10,000 would be enough) to cover all the worlds needs, but you get my point here. On the other hand we need probably on the order of 500 million teachers to cover all the teaching. The art of coding had changed so much in the last 20 years. If we teach them what is popular today, it may be archaic in 20 years by time they start coding. I started on Apple II's BASIC, moved to Commodores BASIC, then to TI Logo, C, Pacal, Machine Code, LabVIEW, JavaScript and so on and so forth. Now I am "publicly" in Python and Java, and each realm though building on the last is completely different from the one before. What would we teach? Bits? Object Oriented? DBs? HTML? 2-D Graphics? 3-D Graphics? Integration? There is no "key" concept here. What everyone needs is reading, social skills, morals, history, politics, and so forth; not coding.