I agree - there's no question that lots of people would benefit from even a little coding knowledge! But computers are evolving in a direction that makes coding knowledge less useful - shell scripting is irrelevant in a world full of iPads. In that future, the only people who need any coding knowledge would be the folks who write the software for the iPads and such, but the idea of teaching everyone BASIC in middle school just to introduce them to programming (like I was) would be pretty quaint.

I don't like that future, and I don't know how we'd get kids interested in programming in that future. But returning to the topic, I don't foresee a near future where something similar happens to basic math knowledge.