How We Learn to Be Wrong Together |
We learn early that agreement feels safer than being right.
Children quickly discover that belonging and seeing clearly are not always the same.
Some of what we call identity grows from habits and loyalties we absorb early on.
Discernment is the practice of perceiving, judging, testing, and revising what seems true.
Around 9 is a threshold age for metacognition, when a child begins to think about their own thinking. Looking back, I can see that year as the beginning of questions that have never left me. How do we learn to notice? How do we examine what we have been handed? How do we revise what no longer holds? Much of what I noticed was wonder. Too much of it was horror.
Throughout my childhood, the Vietnam War visited our house every day via the morning headlines and the CBS evening news. Body counts and “our boys” in flag-draped coffins. It was so common it ceased to register at the kitchen table.
We were worn down by the lie of inevitability. I heard older kids talking about numbers and lotteries. Before I had the language for it, I lived in a state of hypervigilance, mortified I would be next. I would one day be the boy they were talking about. But the most terrifying thing to me was not dying. It was that I would be mandated to kill someone. The terror and disgust have never fully left me.
It was too much to live with, so I rescued myself by studying space. Dad brought home a set of encyclopedias, and I was convinced they would help me decode the larger mysteries, including why people kill each other. I was on the road to inviolable truth.
And I had a teacher I adored. Through her, I learned a seemingly simple lesson that became one of the deepest........