Children often see distinctions more clearly than adults. What happens when we train them to ignore it?
Discernment is not just thinking but a sensory skill that can be strengthened or lost.Teaching discernment begins by taking children's perceptions seriously. As contradictions abound and even truth can seem expendable or only mildly interesting, it is worth asking why.
Why does it sometimes feel as though the distinctions that once anchored judgment, the difference between true and false, careful and careless, credible and merely persuasive, have begun to flatten? This flattening is not just a crisis of the mind. It is a loss of the senses. We see it in the literal disappearance of the fine line. Hey, what happened? They discontinued teaching cursive? Cursive trains the hand to notice distinctions the eye might otherwise miss. It builds sensitivity to pressure, curve, and timing that can't be approximated.I always thought cursive was a sneaky way to teach the artist’s way, a pencil-and-paper initiation into the grace of the curve, the pressure of the lead, the unique mark of a hand. If we stop training the hand to draw distinctions, why are we surprised when the eye stops looking for them? And when the eye stops looking, the mind stops expecting them. How will I know what is real? And how have we ever known? An antidote to this flattening is a renewed consciousness of discernment. Use it or lose it. And, at the very least, we have misplaced it. Children are taught to distinguish shapes and learn words, and they are often fiercely literal in their beliefs and definitions. When I called my mother on something I knew to be true, she said, “You should become a lawyer.” I remember stopping, trying to figure out what she meant.outside. We often find these parsings annoying, evasive, or even willfully obstinate. So we shut them down. We want obedience. We want them waiting for orders. We will run this ship. And in doing so, we train out of them the very capacity we later wonder why nobody has., argued that the child who perceives accurately and insists on it is often the one corrected into compliance. Carol Gilligan, the ethicist and psychologist, showed that voices dismissed as naïve are rarely distributed at random. They tend to belong to those already at the margins. Discernment, it turns out, has never been equally permitted. Kids and women who show it are often scoffed at. Same dismissal. Same shutdown. For some neurodivergent children, this is not a phase. The parsing is permanent. So is the annoyance and dismissiveness they meet at every turn. I eventually understood my mother’s remark about lawyers. Lawyers train to a double-coded appreciation for precision. They know the language of the law and how to bend it into a loophole. They have both alacrity and rhetorical judo. They can defend a distinction or dismantle one. You love it when the lawyer is on your side. You call it a cheating technicality when you lose. Same skill. Different verdict. There is something to learn from both the child and the lawyer. The child has the instinct. The lawyer has the techniques: the pins, throws, and submissions of the discipline. The child follows the letter because that is all they know. The lawyer chooses letter or spirit depending on which one wins. It is a quality of mind to find meaning in the in-between. But there is also a necessity to be exact. The real skill is knowing when to push on a distinction and when to let it go, how to wield it without becoming insufferable about it.is everything. But authenticity alone does not make you credible. I may be real, but I am really not qualified. You still need the edge of precision. In years of teaching engineers to speak about analytical work and directing actors to interpret text, I have noticed something consistent. Engineers tend to overthink. Performers tend to overfeel. The task is the same in both cases. Relax the analytical side and tighten the feeling. What you want is the combination of precision and relaxation. When someone is both relaxed and precise, they command Without discernment, we cannot appreciate the high fidelity of experience. We vibrate at a basic frequency and live in the flatness of the general and the vanilla. Without discernment, we react to the world in banal ways. What kind of car were they driving? Umm, red? Maybe? That balance, relaxed and precise, is what discernment looks like in practice. It is not rigidity. It is not pedantry. It is the quietThink of the sommelier. We sometimes mistake their ease for elitism, but their testing is the definition of rigor. It takes years to distinguish cherry from pomegranate, copper from steel in a faint swirl of wine. No sommelier claims that discernment simply appeared. It was forged. We should all aspire to that level of sophistication: detecting the notes of propaganda, the mouthfeel of deceit, the synthetic aftertaste of deepfakes, the algorithmic perfume of manufactured outrage, and identifying the rare, authentic people who can actually change the world. Can discernment be taught to children? In some situations, it is already there. Those are moments for praise, not correction. Teach them the old Greek idea that the beginning ofThe stakes are not small. We inhabit a world where the exactitudes of truth and the grotesque performances of it have rendered public discourse absurd and formless. Theorator is always waiting, not to inform but to manipulate, not to teach people to think but to teach them to follow. Children without discernment are children left exposed. We must empower them before someone else does. There is hope. Several states have now mandated the return of cursive to elementary curricula, recognizing what we almost allowed to disappear. The hand, it turns out, has something to teach the mind. Cursive is training. The hand learns the curve. The eye learns proportion. The mind learns the discipline of form. But why stop at cursive? Why not aspire to calligraphy? Every curve is a decision. Every stroke, a judgment about beauty, proportion, and pressure. The calligrapher does not simply write. They discern, letter by letter. It seemed to do something for Steve Jobs. After dropping out of Reed College, he audited a calligraphy class and later called it the most beautiful course he had encountered. He credited it with shaping the typography that defined the first Macintosh. The hand learned to draw fine distinctions. The eye followed. The mind built something that changed the world.Self Tests are all about you. Are you outgoing or introverted? Are you a narcissist? Does perfectionism hold you back? Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today.
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