Teaching kids code not computers, but to other levels as well

" Starting in primary school, children from all backgrounds and every part of the UK should have the opportunity to: learn some of the key ideas of computer science; understand computational thinking; learn to program; and have the opportunity to progress to the next level of excellence in these activities.
We'll get to why this is important and necessary in a moment, but first we need to face up to a painful fact. It is that almost everything we have done over the last two decades in the area of ICT education in British schools has been misguided and largely futile. Instead of educating children about the most revolutionary technology of their young lifetimes, we have focused on training them to use obsolescent software products. And we did this because we fell into what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle would have called a "category mistake" – an error in which things of one kind are presented as if they belonged to another. We made the mistake of thinking that learning about computing is like learning to drive a car, and since a knowledge of internal combustion technology is not essential for becoming a proficient driver, it followed that an understanding of how computers work was not important for our children"
A radical manifesto for teaching computing | Education | The Observer

Overall of course I agree with this, since perhaps the most notable feature of modern technology, is how little specialized skill is needed to use them. Motion sensors, voice recognition and touch screens mean even the input mechanisms are almost "natural" and one barely needs to be able to use even a keyboard and mouse any more. This trend indicates the real need will not be training in tools, since the tools require training less and less,  but education about the tools,  their hidden internal structures,  not only to foster an environment to develop more and better tools, but to maintain an independence from them, since a common downside of ease of use is over reliance and too much trust. The less we have to think about using the tools, the less able we are to handle situations where they go wrong, or , more importantly, even spot when they might.
The only reservation I have is that while incredibly useful, computational, algorithmic thinking can also be restrictive, and am always wary of it being exalted as the paradigm of "intelligence",  and there is a risk that introducing these skills early, without appropriate balance, may have limiting effects on creative development. The point is just as  education should focus on the structures behind the tools, it must also include an analysis of the foundations of those very structures themselves. Education not only go beyond the how to the why, but to the why not as well.