I could be wrong, but: I figure there’s a canon answer, and — the Dope being what it is — I figure someone here knows what it is.
So li’l Anakin gets flatly told that he has Jedi reflexes due to his prowess as a pod racer. That’s before he wins the big race; after that, he’s told that he’s strong with The Force.
Qui-Gon checks the kid’s midichlorian count; cue exposition that it’s higher than Yoda’s — and higher than any Jedi’s, and the highest concentration Qui-Gon has ever seen — and cue Anakin being tested, at Qui-Gon’s request, by the Jedi Council: images appear on a screen outside his line of sight, and the kid rattles off answer after answer with ease. And they say at him what we’ve already heard — that his cells contain a high concentration of midichlorians, and that The Force is strong with him — prompting the kid to ask Qui-Gon about midichlorians; Qui-Gon explains that they’re microscopic lifeforms inside his cells that communicate with The Force and continually speak to him of The Force (adding that, when you learn to quiet your mind, you, yes, you, Anakin, will hear them speaking to you of The Force).
That’s around when Mace Windu states that Anakin “will not be trained.” Yoda follows up with a stopgap “train him not; take him with you, but train him not” when explaining that “young Skywalker’s fate will be decided later.”
So: do we know what the protocol was, in the days of the old republic, in cases like that? If the Council were to come across some other kid who’s professionally using Jedi reflexes, and displaying other Strong With The Force abilities that reflect a high midichlorian count — and who knows he has a high midichlorian count, and knows what that means — do we know what they do?
Is it nothing, and they just let him go his own way? Or: let him go, but with a couple of stern warnings? Or: let him go, but check in with him every so often? Or: what? Had this come up before?
Yoda sensed Fear in Anakin. His instincts told him that training Anakin would be a mistake and lead to trouble. Which it did.
They normally take in kids under the age of five, because by then they haven’t made any headstrong decisions about who they want to be. So training Anakin was against policy just for that reason alone, which I think was the “official” justification. But the truth was that Yoda had misgivings, Mace Windu was a stick-in-the-mud, and Ki Adi Mundi was a doubtful skeptic.
What does anyone do? They let them live their life. I dunno. Do you think they incarcerate them or send them off to trade school? I’m not sure what you’re getting at.
Since Dark Side folks are a pain in the Jedis’ collective butt, they sure could choose to keep an eye on them and if they show signs of developing Dark tendencies, kill them then while it’s still easy. Or at least do that to as many such folks as come to their attention. Or simply kill them promptly after the Council’s decision.
OTOH, if they did that, there wouldn’t be very many Dark Side practitioners about for the Dark Side to have become a well-known and feared problem. So for dramatic reasons, much better to leave the fearful ones out there to self-train into antagonists for the protagonist Jedi to contend with later.
In-world logic and plot logic are separate fields.
Obi-Wan is pretty free with his lightsaber from the first time we see him draw it in the Mos Eisley cantina, and as warrior-priests, the Jedi generally seem to consider themselves judge, jury, and executioner in any situation they find needing in adjudication, and are ruthlessly efficient in pursuing their agenda.. We aren’t specifically told what happens to padawans who they sense turning to the ‘Dark Side’ but I think we all know that every Jedi temple has a secret mass grave beneath it.
Not a fan of the “good guys are actually bad” reframing the Internet loves to do. The Jedi were the good guys. They wouldn’t murder kids because they couldn’t or wouldn’t be trained. I am not saying they weren’t flawed. They were. Their hubris helped lead to the end of the Republic. And individuals will always make mistakes so not everything works out well when Jedi are involved . But at the end of the day their intentions as an institution were selfless.
Are they, though? The Jedi are quite tolerant of corruption, venality, and even genocide. Count Dooku eventually turned to the ‘Dark Side’ at least in part because the Jedi Council elected to do nothing about an impending invasion of his home planet. They generally come across in equal measures as incompetent, manipulative, and exploitative, and while they are ‘good’ in contrast to the deterministically evil Sith, they are also shown to be Machiavellian in their strategy and politicking. They certainly don’t want any nascent ‘Darkside’ Force-users wandering around and are even pretty intolerant to any other factions or creeds of Force-wielding people in general regardless of purported philosophical alignment.
But that’s what I’m asking, because I genuinely don’t know: does this come up, in, like, the prequel novelizations, or the comic books or the cartoons or something? Like, do they come across a guy who’s just earning a living as a bodyguard by dint of quick-draw reflexes — or the ability to mentally yoink an assailant’s gun away, or whatever — and he’s not pursuing a dark-side agenda, but just cashing paychecks as a law-abiding citizen of the republic?
Or a guy who entertains people with parlor tricks, and — that’s it? Or, shit, just to bring this all the way back around: a racer with ESP who wins competitions as easily as Qui-Gon Jinn cheats at dice?
Does this happen to come up, is what I’m asking: folks who have a high midichlorian count, but didn’t actually get the Jedi training, but do make use of Jedi-esque powers, but don’t go around harming innocents? And what, if anything, happens when they wind up on the radar of Windu and Yoda and the like?
This question is one of the core issues in the disney plus series The Acolyte.
Slight spoiler answering the OP:
There is a character who starts their jedi training but is deemed to emotional to continue and so is kicked out of the academy and left to their own devices.
My impression is that without training, a force sensitive may have a expanded intuition and reflexes, but won’t be able to do any of the really fancy stuff and so is generally harmless. While a trained jedi lured away to the darkside is a dangerous threat. So if there is a significant chance of that happening it’s best to leave them untrained.