It is probably economically motivated. Estonia, like many central and eastern European countries, is seeing strong relative growth in their technology sectors. Rhetoric, drawing, dancing & carpentry are not exactly as likely to drive the nation's economy in 2023 when these children graduate from school.

What if they did?

You cannot really predict the future. In the early 90s in my country (Bulgaria) there was an extreme need of accountants and many programmers emigrated (and we had massive amounts of engineers due to socialist planning). Now accountants are not in a short supply and programmers are relatively well paid.

My point is - you really cannot predict the future. Education is supposed to prepare you for life, whatever it may serve you, not to grant you a carrier.

I'm all for having a better education. And maybe a little programming literacy might be really useful. I just seriously hope the Estonian state doesn't expect its future generations to become a nation of programmers.

I think you may be drawing a fairly extreme conclusion from the article (or my comment). It's unlikely the Estonian government intends to breed a nation of programmers. At the same time, it's not exactly reckless to give school age children the necessary foundation to become developers should they so desire.

I wonder if the goal is not to create programmers? Much like teaching geometry isn't to prepare students for a career of proving the congruency of pairs of triangles.

The mental skills one uses to give unambiguous instruction to an computer may be valuable in communicating unambiguously with humans or decomposing seeming intractable problems.

Then again, you could probably go for a similar goal using mathematics.

Like someone else commented, it's most certainly being done for economic reasons. The advantage is that when you can automate a bunch of work and earn a lot of money doing so, you you're left with lots of time and money to spend on other pursuits like rhetoric, drawing and dancing.

Because programming in itself is a language and now a fundamental language that you will need to understand to talk to "things" in the future?

As a programmer, I have to agree. Of the many skills I think every kid should know, programming does not really rank highly. I'd rather they teach something like cooking or first-aid.

Unless teaching programming or some web design work is taking a huge amount of time each week, there's no reason cooking or first-aid can't be taught as well. However, cooking is one thing that is not likely to be taught; the use of knives or even a single shared oven is a disaster waiting to happen, at least according to my brother (he's a primary school teacher).

My main concern would be having the teachers trained to be able to provide such an education themselves. Often primary school teachers tend to be older and female; for whatever reasons, this is not a demographic that would be particularly capable of learning 'enough' programming to teach it effectively, even at a primary school level.

However, as an Estonian citizen I think it's pretty cool idea. There is a big push here to make the country IT-focused, so it's no surprise this filters down to the lower levels of education.