It sounds like you're suggesting that we should replace our children's life with sterile simulations of reality?
I'm a programmer but I value physical experience far more than anything a machine can portray.
The programming bit allows me to remove the menial tasks and solve the menial problems so I can enjoy my real attachment to this world.
Computers are useful for doing math, but for most kids, and even most adults, that's one of least interesting things they can do.
A program isn't just a hammer. It can be a paintbrush, a tape recorder, a story, a symphony, or a lab assistant. And a program is more than any of these things -- a real-life paintbrush can't change the size of its bristles, and you have to draw every stroke by hand. On a computer, everything's just code. You can run your "paintbrush" routine billions of times, vary its parameters using your voice, or earthquake data, or a physics simulation, or anything you can imagine.
As a programmer, maybe I'm biased, but I can't imagine any job beyond the most menial where the ability to program wouldn't make me more productive.