[jiggy2011]

When I went to school (in the UK) both learning at least 1 foreign language and basic precalc stuff were compulsary part of the education at GCSE (age 16) level.

I would be extremely sceptical of the claim that 50% of people cannot learn programming as much as I would be sceptical of the claim that the same number of people would be incapable of learning written english or basic algebra. This is assuming that there is good quality instruction available (this is of course the hard part in reality).

Bear in mind we are probably talking about very simple stuff here like for loops , simple algorithms like bubblesort and maybe some javascript animations or whatever.

How to architect large OO systems, how to handle concurrency etc are probably not topics that need to be covered here at all. Students who want to study to be professional programmers will likely do extracurricular learning or take further courses.

I taught myself to do simple program at ~age 10 and please believe me when I say that I was in no way a gifted child. Not only this but I successfully taught some of my friends how to program and they didn't seem to struggle too much.

Programming can also bring new dimensions to other classes, for example it helped me check answers in math, made algebra much more intuitive and I even submitted a text adventure in place of a linear story in a creative writing class.