At the risk of making this point to death:
> If you took a random person you passed on a busy London street at lunch time, how much better do you think they would be able to do their job if they knew how to program?
A while back I was in a meeting being given a presentation that had previously been given to the CEO of our company (they were giving it to us to keep us up to date). In it, there was a quite obvious problem with the numbers where the reported percentage increase was nowhere near what the numbers suggested. I raised my hand to point it out and was mildly surprised when the manager giving the presentation told me that he didn't want to report numbers that were too high. I decided not to point out that mathematics doesn't care about what he wants to report.
So anyway, this guy who is paid lots of money at a reasonably sized company doesn't even have a passing knowledge of statistics, something that every school child was supposed to learn. Would he have been better able to do his job if he knew math? Probably. But he doesn't know math. All those years in school didn't really rub off on him.
In any case, if you were to ask how many people use literary analysis, math, art, history or science in their work the answer is going to be close to zero. It's true that lots of people write as part of their job, but most people write poorly and most writing classes focus on analyzing Shakespeare, not writing reports on employee efficiency.
Another argument for programming in schools is the same as the argument for literature in schools. Even if you never need to program in the real world being able to program implies that you have certain cognitive and logical abilities that many jobs require. For example, it is important to be logical if you are a lawyer, even though you needn't program.
I would not be prepared to dismiss coding out of hand because not many people are programmers. I bet it is more pertinent then most of the things I learned in high school.