> Secondly, a world where EVERYONE has a job where computing is of central importance is one I personally would never strive towards. We should ask ourselves if we really want to stick all of society behind a computer.
This is not really what we are advocating. Our claim with "Read Write Code" is that these are now essential skills, even if that is not what you spend all of your time doing. Few become professional readers or writers, but many find reading and writing useful skills. Computers are used in many parts of daily life--even if you don't become a programmer, a knowledge of problem solving with computers will be useful.
Actually almost everyone is a professional reader/writer. Even programmers read and write as part of their professional practice, and I can't really think of any job where at least verbal communication plays a vital role. The way I see it, computers should be a vital and practical part of teaching quantitative reasoning, and quantitative reasoning should be given the same attention as language skills. It wasn't in my high school, where less math was required.
This is not really what we are advocating. Our claim with "Read Write Code" is that these are now essential skills, even if that is not what you spend all of your time doing. Few become professional readers or writers, but many find reading and writing useful skills. Computers are used in many parts of daily life--even if you don't become a programmer, a knowledge of problem solving with computers will be useful.