Very nice answer and much appreciated. One additional bit which I only saw lightly touched on is the correlation between breadth of knowledge and general intelligence / creativity. Exposure to a wide range of subjects helps build the mental linkages for students so that they can form the equivalent of mental analogies about new material and solve new problems by reference to solutions in other areas. Coding has a lot of potential in this area, as the fundamental concepts of algorithms and machine logic are broadly applicable to a wide range of subjects. In addition, the solutions you see in programming (barnes hutt trees, steepest decent, network theory, binary search, ect...) are optimized solutions to fundamental questions of how the world works. Once those solutions have been seen in programming, the understanding of the world they communicate can then be taken and applied to comprehend and solve problems in other areas of life.