Promulgating ignorance

Most people have the same natural comprehension of factual information that fish have of mountaineering.

Bernays felt that a primary goal of authority was to maintain ignorance amongst the general population.
By so doing the citizenry became easy to manipulate, and would fail to see what authority was really about.
Goebbels learned from Bernays, as did a host of other advisors to dictators. The ultimate goal was to produce
an educational system which promulgated ignorance guised as learning. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

Bernays' primary means of gaging the success of a propaganda system was the testing to see if its targets where unaware that they were being manipulated. And moreover failed to recognize their own purposeful ignorance even when the means of manipulation was pointed out to them. In a completely unrelated aside Durkheim, Parsons, Dewey, Rugg, Rudin and those who followed ensured that there exists a system of compulsory education in which all from a very young age, must by force of law participate. The result of this carefully constructed and perpetuated pedagogical system is a citizenry acculturated to and in ignorance.

The list below is a much shortened version of surveys conducted amongst adults in the USA, at least 18 years of age and all of whom had experienced compulsory schooling for the majority of those years. Results are collapsed across various polls conducted by CNN, the Gallup organization, the Washington post, Time Magazine, Harris Polls, Knight Ridder Newspapers, National Geographic Surveys, the New York Times, and several others. That anyone who has been through an educational system could lack such basic knowledge as indicated below, shows not only the utter failure of pedagogy in producing an educated citizenry, but also its wild success in producing a citizenry acculturated to profound ignorance.

96% could not name in order, the nine innermost planets (most could not name more than three planets, most did not know there were extra-solar planets)
95% believed their system of government was a democracy
93% could not properly define democracy or recognize the term 'plutocracy'
92% believed that Japan surrendered after the US dropped atomic bombs on them rather than before
87% believed the legal right to carry a gun prevented crime
87% did not know what an engineering graduate does (most though they drove trains)
86% believed it was highly probable they would be physically harmed by a stranger (the actual probability is less than 0.01)
83% of those aged 18-25 could not find Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, or Vietnam on a map, 69% could not find England.
83% believed 'terrorism' was the primary danger they faced on a daily basis, through virtually none could accurately describe the term
74% believed violent crime in the US had been steadily increasing (it has radically dropped in the past 20 years)
65% could not describe the basic facts about Watergate or the corrupt White House it elucidated
57% believed that humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time (closer to 80% in Kansas and Arkansas)

Again, that such a high percentage of the citizenry should respond thus, is IMHO testament to several primary factors, amongst which are:

An educational system designed to keep eliminate outliers and to keep all others deeply acculturated to eschewing intelligent inquiry
A media designed to remove depth of coverage, exploration of alternate interpretations, and information contrary to the current social narrative
A culture of fear whose only solution is warfare
The relegation of spiritual endeavor to formulaic, tautological story book themes

Willfull ignorance is the fuel that powers wanton militarism, environmental collapse, growing economic inequality, and the destruction of democracy.