While there is a whole field devoted to the widely esteemed enterprise of epistemology, until fairly recently much less attention has been given to "agnotology," the study of ignorance. Epistemologists of ignorance use the concept agnotology to signify the study of the making and unmaking of ignorance, as well as the task of understanding how it has been and can be harnessed for political ends.The author of this article argues that reevaluating ignorance and positioning it as neither a simple nor innocent lack of knowledge, but as an active force of both psychic and social consequence, might help people find common ground with difference and engage in critical community. One can use philosophy to help trace all the different forms structural ignorance might take. As one approaches ignorance one must consider its varieties such as those "strategic unknowns," "the non selected or non cultivated," and those censored, erased, classified, forbidden, difficult, and dangerous forms of knowledge. In this article, the author examines states' political and policy attempts to create closed community by explicitly forbidding particular knowledges. The author first theorizes those major areas of ignorance she sees as structural that close down community debate and communities of difference. She then examines a particular educational example, the spate of so-called "Don't Say Gay" bills. The author ends her article with brief philosophical suggestions on how philosophers of education can become more discerning in their approach to ignorance(s). (Contains 17 footnotes.)