No.

IMO, democracy depends upon an educated electorate, especially when faced with exceptionally technical, complex issues. Progress requires such individuals making individual decisions in their own interest, the collection of which advances a country far faster than can control by a central authority no matter what "expert" advice is followed. Government's roles should be devising and maintaining the rules of the game, ensuring that the playing field is level and that the costs external to the transaction (such as acid rain) are understood and captured within the particular marketplace by a means that provides clear signals and trends to the participants. No distortions from subsidies or special tax treatments that echo across the economy, messing up what should be clear market signals to individuals making economic choices. The role of experts is to inform the public; if they cannot do so sufficiently then the primary need is to fix that failure. Then the public can inform the politicians by acting in its role as an informed electorate.

When the government messes up big time on the referee/level playing field function, debacles such as the subprime loan crisis (and the saving and loam crisis before that) occurs. When government messes up market signals through pandering subsidies and tax policy because of politicians harvesting votes, the ethanol situation results. IMO, ethanol is going to end up being agriculture's equivalent of subprime lending for the banking industry.

I'm troubled by the claimed need for an educated electorate. We've never had one. No one has. It seems an improbable, perhaps impossible requirement. It's an attractive idea but it doesn't seem realistic.

I think that there's an unstated assumption in both the original text and your rebuttal that it is necessary and desirable to have high level political control of society. The claim in the original text that this requires expert authority, and your claim that this requires, in effect, an expert electorate have merit if we accept the assumptions. But, in my view, one is undesirable and the other is improbable.

I also question the assumptions and the longer term implications of solutions that do accept those assumptions.

I don't think that high level political control would result in effective solutions no matter whether they are the product of domain experts or a sufficiently educated electorate. I think it's an ineffective approach. The details - expert or electorate - seem unimportant if neither can achieve desirable ends. Worse in some ways, in the long term both approaches regiment society and would reduce its robustness and creativity. We can imagine scenarios where this didn't happen, but I find them unrealistic. The evidence we have indicates a monotonic decline in the quality of society as cohesion increases. It doesn't matter whether this cohesion results from authoritarian oppression or shared views. It's destructive in all cases.

It may be that you agree for the most part given your assertion that "progress requires . . . individuals making individual decisions in their own interest" and that "government's roles should be devising and maintaining the rules of the game". Our disagreement may be only in the idea that increased cohesion due to increased education is also harmful.

I can imagine an educated electorate that is not cohesive. I can even imagine an education system that does not "stifle innovation and constructive engagement of real controversies, not just sometimes, but most of the time, systematically." But it's just my imagination running away with me.