> If you were unfortunate enough to attend a school that didn't have any sort of computing classes, after school groups, etc, or you lived somewhere rural that didn't have those programmes outside of school then you would have had no access to a mentor who can guide you.

I grew up in a small Greek village at a time when very few people knew what a computer was. My first exposure to programming was finding a CD with all sorts of things in it, including Visual Basic 4. I had no internet, so literally the only thing I had to go on was the VB language reference (the reference, as in, this function does that), and a two-page tutorial on making a temperature converter.

I taught myself programming using just that reference and tutorial, and nothing else. I don't believe courses are necessary if you want to learn programming.