I see it more as offering the opportunity to people to have an interest in it. I learned to code in my own time, by digging around and finding tutorials and snippets.

Part of my secondary school (high school) education was mandatory science classes where we covered biology, chemistry and physics. The majority of that stuff I haven't used since. With computers being more and more a part of our daily lives, why shouldn't coding be part of what we teach our kids? If they don't take an interest in it then that's fine, but there'll be a good chunk that will then use it later on in life.

Not to mention that it's actually great for teaching problem solving. Showing that breaking down a problem and solving it in a number of steps really helps grasp how to solve a problem.