Ohh I completely agree with you. But what I was mostly reacting to is the idea that the way to propel these kids into the 21st century is to simply teach them some basic coding syntax and leave it at that. Even the new AP CS curriculum seems to take a step back from "hard cs" by adding lots of content not directly related to solving cs problems. All that I really meant is that the true value in coding comes in using it to express solutions to problems, whereas teachers and schools that I've seen try to implement "coding" seem to think that if these kids just memorize syntax they have some great advantage in life.
I'll give you a perfect example. I was asked to evaluate this Scratch course for middle schoolers just as they were about to present their final projects. One of the kids did a basic pong-like game with human-controlled characters. The ball would move all over the place, seemingly randomly. The game didn't seem to make any sense to the kids who played it. But, the administration felt that this was an incredible success.
I later learned that he had produced the game by mostly following along a step-by-step tutorial introduced in class. And I also learned that the reason the ball moved erratically was that the kid had absolutely no concept of how to deal with the angles, much less identify what portion of the character the ball had struck!
To me, THAT would have been the real learning! What an opportunity to have taken that kid outside and kick a soccer ball (this was in Brazil) outside and explore some intuition about how it rebounded on the wall; what a chance to see if he could not come up with a way to grok a solution to figuring out to detect where in the character the ball had hit since this didn't come out-of-the-box in Scratch.
In other words, I don't mind that they learn the syntax. But there's a reason why firms outsource a lot of "coding" to South Asian countries for pennies on the dollar. Knowing the syntax is cheap. Stimulating kids to think about problems, developing a routine and passion about solving them, that's where the real pot of gold is.