Child-led Learning?

I thought we were unschoolers, but I was obviously mistaken.

We're doing Latin almost daily. We're memorizing poems. We're studying the Mesopotamians and now the Egyptians. We just finished reading the Epic of Gilgamesh. We're memorizing grammar definitions and rules. We're practicing our handwriting by copying two lines of Jabberwocky every day. And memorizing it as we go. We're doing Miquon math and Saxon math. We've got five science books stacked up and do something from them every other day or so. I think we just did a unit on worms, fercryin'outloud. Jonathan has his nose buried in Greek myths and Shakespeare's plays half the day. And he's thriving.

On a steady diet of classical education.

He wanted a backpack and a pencil box to put in it. When Benjamen and Nicholas saw this, they, of course, had to have their own, as well. So now all of my boys have backpacks. And pencil boxes.

This is not unschooling, is it?

Much of this is Jonathan nosing through my college books. Much of this is me buying or renting him kid versions of what he finds interesting in my grown-up books, only to see that he often prefers the grown-up books. Much of this is me having to collect a portfolio that has to be evaluated at the end of the year in an attempt to avoid the evil that is standardized testing. Much of this is my own classical education influencing Jonathan, both consciously and unconsciously, I'm sure. And much of this is Jonathan and his amazing ability to memorize practically everything he reads or hears. (I tried to do one of those narrations, where the child makes the story his own by retelling it in his own words, only to realize after the first couple sentences that he was giving the story back to me verbatim.)

I don't know what to think about it all. I love the classics and have experienced first-hand the value of a classical education, so I obviously lean that way, have those materials around, etc. But I never thought I'd have a kid who wanted to do Latin before he ever started Kindergarten. On the other hand, I love the principles and premises of unschooling. It feels right to me and I'll always leaned that way with the boys. When Jonathan taught himself to read when he was two and was memorizing cars, then dinosaurs, then states, then everything, I saw my role as facilitator and get-out-of-his-way-er. I just followed along and was an enthusiastic spectator. Ironically, the kid who's been paving his own way all of these years, has built a road that leads right to the city of The Well-Trained Mind.

I'm living two towns over in Cognitive Dissonance.