I wonder how many people are self taught programmers, functionally or otherwise. Coding isn’t like reading. You aren’t locked out of learning it without a teacher. In order to learn how to code, all you need is a computer and internet access. The question I have to ask is, why should we teach people how to code? Why not let them rely on khan academy and tutorials and coursera. It’s how I learned, and how a lot of people learned, and we learned because we wanted to do something with it.
Coding isn’t like reading, not everybody needs to do it, not everybody should do it, and not everybody can do it. Coding is like math. And like math, after a while, most people just use the calculator on their phones.