I don't know if you can teach kids actual programming that early, maybe the concepts of programming. In any event I agree, and I'd prefer to see shop class come back, but focused on computer maintenance instead of wood.
I'm not sure if I ever shared my feelings on programming "rant" (as I like to call it) on this forum, but here's the gist of it:
Children need to be taught to program starting in the first grade. Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Programming. There is no more important language for a human being to be able to "speak" to be competitive in the global economy of the future than the language of machines. There will be a qualitative difference in career choices between people who can speak to machines by themselves and people who have to get someone else to do it for them.
I believe that computers and people are economically symbiotic in the world we're living in and moving to, and unless you can program a machine to do work to increase your productivity, your career choices will be limited one day. Bi-lingualism shouldn't be English and Spanish, or English and French or French and German, but your mother tongue and a programming language.
That has to start when kids are young. And to be clear, this isn't necessarily to make every kid a computer scientist. It's the exact same thing as making every kid literate. Literacy is essentially opening up a second pathway of information transmission (spoken word being the first way). Learning to program is opening up a second major path of information manipulation to do work, for all people.
There is not a thing in the world I feel more strongly about that this. I spent some time in my early career working on developing a programming language for kids called Scratch. I would happily do it again. I hope we see serious money behind it one day. It will change the world for the better.