People need to be treated as adults before they can be expected to act like adults. There's always the risk that goes wrong, it has in the past, but we're doomed if we believe the only way forward is a small group of elites forcing change on us because they "know best".
Reasoned, informed votes aren’t a major factor in elections.
[edit] see if your library has a copy of Democracy for Realists and also dig into older major works they cite, if you’re interested in more on this. For a quick gut-check, look up the proportion of US voters that understand how marginal income tax rates work, then reflect on the fact that this is something very simple that directly affects them in ways they must confront at least once per year, and despair at how bad similar measures must look for practically everything else and that if they don’t understand the basics of how things work, they can’t even begin to figure out “what’s best” for them or for anyone else.
I'm not sure how we could untangle the issue of today's uneducated populace with our education system itself. If people don't understand marginal tac rates, for example, and most people go to public school because the government makes it pretty difficult to choose anything else, is it not the fault of public education for either not teaching it or teaching it poorly?
More importantly in my opinion, if people don't care to understand it that's fine - they can make that choice. If the system still works and no one complains, great. If it becomes a problem we can either better educate people on how it works or move to a more simply form of taxation that is easier for people to understand.
Both of those factors are, to use the scientific term, completely fucked in the US, which is why we’re where we are now. We’re not here because people think that we spend 20% of our budget on foreign aid, but rather, people think that because of concentration and capture of media ownership, and intense lobbying. The ignorance would be there either way, but the direction and form of it is carefully cultivated, and allowing that cultivation is the problem.
The generation of hard data demonstrating that voters (more or less) don’t know jack-shit about anything goes back to IIRC the 1950s, and the best answer Poli Sci has for why this results in a functioning system at all is that voter behavior is fairly erratic (much of it amounts to “do I perceive that things are bad, even that have nothing to do with the government or with me? Then throw the bums out!”) and (this was once accepted but is now controversial) that voter ignorance kinda balances out by virtue of being chaotic. If that ignorance becomes directed, however, both of these things are weaponizable or breakable.
Acting like an adult requires practice and learning lessons when you mess up. Treating those you may disagree with, or don't trust, as children is a self fulfilling prophecy and strips them of the dignity of having the chance to make their own decisions and deal with the consequences.
