Was it also surprising that no school ever had compulsory classes in agriculture/electricity/plumbing/electronics/medicine/all the other things that cause such changes in society, or is programming somehow special?

Agriculture was compulsory at my high school for the first four years. We learned to drive tractors in the first year, managed our own vegetable allotments in the second, administered injections to animals in the third, and pregnancy tested cows in the forth. No, this wasn't decades ago, this is still the case at my school today.

Penmanship is something I recall being a compulsory subject in elementary school. Even though I haven't written anything on paper since I left school, it was a skill that was necessary to get through to that point.

Programming is useful for engaging in many scholarly subjects. Like penmanship, it may simply be that the schools see programming as a tool that will be needed in order to teach subjects in later courses, and not due to any connections to industry.

I think computer literacy is essential for all professions now (software is eating the world, etc) and I think the most effective way to teach it is by teaching programming, not the kind of dumbed-down word-processor courses that remain popular.