Everyone should get the opportunity to program, but school is a waste of time

That is not entirely a thing of the past. My zoned high school in New York City only graduated about a third of its incoming students when I was a teenager (I was fortunate enough to go to a more well-funded school). What do you think those high school drop-outs were doing? Some were in gangs, others were out working. There are still families that are so poor that they start pressuring children to work as soon as the law allows it.

"Without school how do those kids get an education?"

A large number of those drop-outs are only barely literate, and only barely able to do basic arithmetic. The question is not, "How can they be educated without school?" but rather, "How can they be educated?" We still struggle with that issue.

"basic numeracy and literacy skills a child needs to function in society."

As it turns out, the minimum literacy skills needed to function in society are taught somewhere between 2nd and 4th grade. You do not really need to be able to read at a more advanced level for many lines of work, where your vocation training is entirely hands-on and where you have calculators or computers to do your arithmetic and logic. My mother is a blue-collar worker, and some of her coworkers are only barely literate enough to fill out incident reports (she often has to help them). You do not even need to be literate to vote in a national election.

The problem with being uneducated is not that you cannot live -- people with no income can still survive in our society. The problem is that an uneducated person is at a great disadvantage in our society, being cut off from opportunities and being easily taken advantage of by educated people. Uneducated people are far more likely to waste money on the lottery. Uneducated people are far more likely to forfeit their right to remain silent if they are arrested. Uneducated people are far less likely to attain leadership positions or financial security.

Unfortunately, the public education system as it exists today utterly fails to give people the minimum education needed to avoid all of the above. I suspect that giving people the education needed to be leaders or compete effectively in our capitalist system (or, heaven forbid, to change that system) is not even a goal of the education system. Vocational training is not a goal either -- trade schools are popular for a reason. If you were to ask me, I would tell you that the goal of our education system is to produce compliant workers who accept their place in a rigid social hierarchy. It is not just the "bad students" who are punished in school; students who master the material of a course and then stop bothering to show up are equally punished, even when their teachers are fully aware that they are bored. Low grades -- in the D or even F range -- are given for failing to do homework, regardless of the education value of that homework. Punishments are doled out for insubordination, regardless of what it was that the student was doing (e.g. a student who was smoking pot in a bathroom will be punished the same as a student who cut class to go to the computer lab and learn how to program).

Really, this is a problem of values. We do not value education. The people in power, who received a quality education that focused on teaching them how to think, have little interest in ensuring that poor people learn anything other than compliance. If the goal were to ensure that people are learning to think, we would not be using structured tests where the precise subjects to be covered are known in advance to evaluate academic progress (nor would we be pressuring teachers to deliver high scores on those exams).

I could just as easily go on about the detrimental effect of standardized education. The executive summary is this: societies do not advance when everyone thinks the same way as everyone else.

A lecture is not the only way to educate people. Yes, lectures are boring, but discussions are not and in college and grad school I have been in discussions that went long past the scheduled end time for a class. There is no reason that could happen in high schools as well.

Yes, things are different below a certain age. Most people who hated school talk about how much they hated high school and perhaps middle school. There is a period of time where people start to want to think independently, but where our education system is based on teaching everyone to think the same things. Compliance and conformity are the goals in American schools; education is secondary, mostly a side-effect of teaching compliance.

Traditional schooling is the cause of the problems people have in school. Keeping it, but making special exceptions for people who are bright but failing, is like having a tow truck drag your car to work in the morning because you did not want to take it to a mechanic.

In an American school, the goal is to have all the students think the same way. We have laws that reinforce that goal at all levels of government. All students learn basic algebra and basic trigonometry. Very few learn Euclidean geometry, and almost none learn non-Euclidean geometry. A math teacher is not in any way free to decide their curriculum; the curriculum is given to the teacher, who forces it upon the students. A standardized test is given to all students at the end of the year, and it always has the same format, same subjects, and similar questions.

That is not a system meant to educate people or to promote their ability to think; it is a system meant to train people to be like everyone else. It is not just that we settled on that because we lacked alternatives. We chose this approach because the people in power did not consider teaching the population how to think to be a priority. If they had considered it to be a priority, standardized testing would have been rejected early on, if it had even been thought of in the first place.

"you have to test kids, otherwise you can't know if they're actually learning anything"

Giving everyone the exact same test, or variants of the same test with all questions being asked in the same way, does nothing to test their academic progress. Anyone can be trained to take a test when the format, subject matter, questions, etc. are all known in advance.

If you want to test people in a meaningful way, you need to give them problems they never encountered before, in formats they never encountered before. Otherwise you are just as likely to identify well-educated students as well-trained students, and you will lack any way to measure the difference.

"Taking literature in college when you're in a CS program is more than dumb"

Only if you think the purpose of college is vocational training. The idea that people go to college to receive job training and job credentials has been extremely destructive to higher education. It is not just that humanities departments are being slashed; in the CS department at my alma mater, computability and algorithms were the only theoretical courses. Compilers had been offered a few years before I arrived, complexity theory was not taught at all, and programming languages was just about different language features without any discussion of type theory. When I asked the department chair why the curriculum was so easy, the answer was that only a handful of CS students actually enjoyed learning CS, and that the department could not afford to have the other students leave as a result of rigorous standards. Those "other students" were only there for job credentials.

If you want vocation training, get a two year associates degree. That will save you time and money, and you will not be part of the wave of destruction that is ruining higher education.

People who are successful despite being uneducated are outliers. Stories like OP (and Bill Gates and countless others) are stories. Anecdotes. Single data points that are meaningless without context. Deciding to forego an education based on such stories is a risky game.