Having just read this guardian article http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/04/coding-school-computing-children-programming  children in the UK are supposed to learn a bit of algorithmics,  computer programming and how a computer actually works.  While many programming literate have picked up a lot of their skills from the internet, most children simply pick up how to use Facebook and Word. So yes I do think, it is a social experiment, but I also do think intentional school learning will make a big difference. Like  teaching reading and writing, and arithmetic did, skills not so long ago considered necessary only for a privileged or extraordinary talented few. 

We all learn what we use and we also forget what we don't use. For example, Math is taught for many years, and yet most people can do just basic arithmetics like a hundred years ago. In spite of the Logic is part of Math, most people use just pure association instead. Thus I infer that teaching algorithms and languages like Scratch is utterly useless. The only hard data from the link is the survey that one third of the parents are aware of the CS curriculum, the rest is a mere opinion. Who and why do suppose that the childs will learn algorithms? I wish you were right about the big difference made by school learning on the field of computer science, but I really don't see anything supporting this opinion. I wish I could see some hard data proving that I'm wrong.

Well, I am a mathematician by training and I would hate to get rid of math in the curriculum, but arguably learning how to do search using boolean operators, use a bit of javascript for a website, filter a dataset with a few lines of code or even to program a little temperature sensor is a skill that more people need more often than, say, solving a quadratic equation. It may also be easier to teach because you can see what the result is. Although I would not be surprised if the political momentum behind all this is the desire to have a Silicon Thames valley that is sexy to speech about on  the conservative party congress or to placate  some banksters in the boardroom of an invest bank, the idea makes some sense. And it has been tried before although on a much smaller scale:

https://code.org/educate

Education isn't just about skills. It's also about understanding. We teach science and mathematics in part because they enhance students' understanding of the world. Only a few will go on to be practising scientists and mathematicians but they might, for example, have some grasp of what physical technology might be capable of by calling on some slight understanding of physics principles.

We shouldn't see teaching of programming just through the prism of skill acquisition. How do Facebook do their tricks? Look, pupils, it's really rather simple -- though, like any kind of engineering, when you want to make it fast and big you run into the limits of the technology and it gets hard to do and hard to understand. Some of your pupils will want to reach the stage when they can think about concurrent distributed databases; most will benefit from an understanding of how web pages really work, and a grasp (we might hope) of what computers are capable of. And, more importantly, what they are not capable of.

That, I think, is the reason to teach programming. It's not coding, it's design for machinery which operates within the constraints of formal logic. When/if we get quantum computers, there will be different constraints, but there will still be programming.

Based on what I read, as long as by the time they get to a university program they get that CS isn't programming, I'm happy.  I think it is fundamental to ensure that mathematics in some way is incorporated into CS courses.  Programming isn't enough if they don't understand any of the science in Computer Science.  This usually involves learning some discrete mathematics (which is a good opportunity especially for high school students, seeing as most high school maths programs do not necessarily focus on discrete mathematics).  Without mathematics, CS is nothing more than hand-waving or arbitrary design, which is why it is important to empathize the core of the field.  That's why maths are the core of CS, and I support any program that does at least attempt to do that.  I know when I did CS (the courses) in high school here in Canada, all we did was learn (not understand really why it works) sorting algorithms in laymen terms, and did lots of programming, nothing more.  I had to teach myself about what an algorithm is (mathematically) and most of my early learning of Theoretical Computer Science outside of school and not until university did I see it again.

Personally (just my opinion), I don't it is fair to call a CS course a CS course if it is really just programming.  Call it Computer Programming or Introductory Computer Engineering or something.  CS fundamentally is about computing, and studying how we can understand scientifically how to solve mathematical problems through computing, the technology of computing, and more.

This curriculum seems to be a decent attempt to go in the right direction, but until they further emphasize the importance of mathematics in computing, it's incomplete (they do a bit of it, but not nearly enough for it to be considered CS rather IT).