The people who learnt to program computers in the 70s and 80s weren't taught at school by teachers, they taught themselves (maybe with help from friends).
The OSes of the 1980s were much simpler than MacOS/Linux/Windows. In particular most of them had a standard BASIC built in which was very easy to start using. One could just turn the computer on and immediately type in a program.
I agree, but that kind of programming is very different from the type of programming that will be useful to non programmer kids when they grow up. There is also google, stack overflow and a waltz of easily accessible information on how to do X in language Y that was not online then.
I am drawing a distinction between coding and programming. Let me explain - When I graduated from college in 1999 the career office was very assertive that I should use and describe my ability with the MS Office productivity suite. When and how it had become an important enough to include on my resume doesn't matter, it was an important skill to have for the types of jobs I was going to be applying for. So programming and programmers will always have to dive deep and be able to develop complex systems. I am using the word coding in the same context as what I started with: I worked in a laboratory and collected lots of scientific data. I learned how to automate the tedious parts of manipulating, formatting and emailing out the results to save my time and reduce the errors I made doing it manually. To me, this was a self taught journey to learning to code with vba and even back in the first half of the Aughts there were decent places to figure things our for VBA.
I think in the future, kids or prospective employees in general that are not programmers, being able to put "can write JavaScript and VBA to automate repetitive tasks" will not be required. But, the candidates who can will have a marketable skill that sets them apart from their peers even though they are both trying to get a job in Supply Chain or Regulatory Affairs.
And these days, JavaScript is very easy to get started with, fire up a modern browser, open up the console and type in your program on any web page. It's been a while since I worked with VBA but I assume it is discussed on stack overflow.
It's still the truth these days. Of course, we don't have basic installed by default anymore. Instead, I have a desire to make video games and it took me several tries over my childhood until I started to program seriously at age 15.