How to reconcile "teach everyone to write" and "only give the top 1% a book deal"?
Just as everything in the school curriculum, everyone should learn it because it is a useful way of thinking and a useful tool to know, and an important perspective if you want to understand the modern world, and to give everyone a chance to discover their talent at it/their particular interest in it in case they have it, in which case it might then lead some to choose it as a career.
Just because your todo list is not world literature, doesn't mean that your ability to write is useless, and just because your little VBA script (or whatever) is not a distributed fault-tolerant system that can process billions of transactions a second, doesn't mean that your ability to write programs is useless.
Just as everything in the school curriculum, everyone should learn it because it is a useful way of thinking and a useful tool to know, and an important perspective if you want to understand the modern world, and to give everyone a chance to discover their talent at it/their particular interest in it in case they have it, in which case it might then lead some to choose it as a career.
Just because your todo list is not world literature, doesn't mean that your ability to write is useless, and just because your little VBA script (or whatever) is not a distributed fault-tolerant system that can process billions of transactions a second, doesn't mean that your ability to write programs is useless.