and, to answer a stupid question: anarchists place a massive focus on public education.

the actual idealization is that anarchists would be intelligent and educated enough to realize that you need to defer to expertise on a topic like this. you don't volunteer to be a surgeon; that's an abuse of the concept of voluntaryism. likewise, this is an engineering problem, and consequently requires engineers to solve. the idea is that the abolition of the state would actually remove the barriers that are preventing the society from carrying through with the rational action of electing an engineer to solve an engineering problem.

put another way, the athenians would have known better - they would have decided by popular decree to put a mathematician in charge. and, they would have. why isn't that obvious? why isn't that happening? because the state imposes cost restraints that a real democracy would have no concern about at all.

i mean, why do we pay taxes in the first place?

there may be other situations where a division of labour is unjust, sure. but, what anarchism means, in context, is getting the state out of the way so that actually rational decisions can be made, and an educated populace would clearly and quickly understand it's need to defer to expertise and it's need to place itself under a command.

anarchism is not the collapse of state institutions, or the abdication of state responsibilities to faith-based organizations - or, in ghastlier scenarios, to the market. it is abdication to the market that is when the affair becomes truly sordid. the abdication of state responsibilities to the church is also an abdication of democracy, as the church is less democratic than the state. and, the market is even less democratic than the church. but, democracy aside, the basic point of failure here is that a church is not an engineering firm; if the dark ages were defined by the slow dominance of the church over affairs that ought to be purely secular and ought to be defined in scientific terms, then thatcherism is in fact a road back to serfdom.

in order for a state to approximate this, it would have to begin with the good sense of an educated mob. but, it doesn't appear to have it.