On Charlotte Mason and Tattooed Sons

My son has a tattoo. He had it done while he was an enlisted Airman. Now that he has left the military and is serving as a sheriff’s deputy, he says he is considering adding another to his collection. He has asked me multiple times for my opinion on this next tattoo. This is something of a joke between us, as you can guess. A 50 year-old homeschooling mother of 10 is not the most likely consultant when it comes to tattoos.

I remember well the “outcome” I had in mind when I began the process of educating my children at home. I had invested many hours in learning about various methodologies and approaches to education before encountering Charlotte Mason’s principles and feeling as if what had felt like a dark mystery that I was considering was suddenly illuminated. I had three young children at the time, each of them different but eager, already so obviously learning through everything and anything they chanced to encounter. As I studied through Miss Mason’s work in those early years, I began to imagine these bright-eyed children grabbing hold of this most delicious life and blossoming into boldly creative thinkers, men and women of logic and compassion and passion– all anchored in their faith and their knowledge of Christ.

Yet, after years spent immersing himself in fine art (most especially in the work of his favorite artist, James McNeill Whistler) my son chose a path that might leave me asking what value I have added to his life. After all, what call is there for an appreciation of Winston Churchill’s oratory talent when one’s primary duty is ensuring that prisoners know their rights? What good is it to have an intimate understanding of the communication amongst bees when your days are spent filing paperwork outlining why force was necessary to quell a fight between two men in custody? My son places himself not in the presence of beauty, but most often in places where sin and darkness are the order of the day.

I am not disappointed.

I am not disappointed because Charlotte Mason took great pains to describe education as “a large room,” and I believe her. A room outfitted with the most beautiful furnishings and lavish tapestries still has corners where dust might gather, and my son, through the workings of the Holy Spirit, has been led into those places to serve. I didn’t know this, of course, when I introduced him to the couch of history, so ornately upholstered by the men God emboldened to lead His people. I couldn’t see it when he set to exploring the wardrobe of music or the cabinet where all of the greatest scientific minds held court. I saw my son touring the vast expanse laid out before him and assumed he would be inspired to try and add something to that large room. Instead, the appreciation he gained as he listened to fairy tales and observed birds in flight lit a different fire in him altogether– the desire to protect and defend that very room.

The hours I spent reading Five Little Peppers and How They Grew mattered every bit as much to this son, who carries a firearm in the line of duty, as they did to his brother, who carries a notepad as he reports the news. Our afternoons journaling the seasonal changes to the Sycamore Maple in our front yard sowed as many seeds into the mind of this justice-minded son as they did for his sister, who teaches children with learning challenges how to read. Nothing was wasted in my years of spreading a feast of education before my child. He is the sum of all the great ideas and rich notions to which he was exposed.

Today, when my son asks me for ideas for his next tattoo, I just laugh, and remember the moment when he revealed to me the one that now dominates his forearm. He rolled up his sleeve, excited to show me the “work” he had chosen. I was less enthusiastic, bracing myself for whatever might be waiting. When I saw it, I was speechless.

My son– my Monster Energy drinking, wall-scaling, sharpshooting son– had tattooed Whistler’s iconic butterfly signature onto his arm.

While I can’t say that Charlotte Mason would have necessarily approved of this particular form of self-expression, I do think she would have found it proof of her assertion that, “what we digest we assimilate, take into ourselves, so that it is part and parcel of us, and no longer separable.” (Home Education vol. 4, p 72)

Heather Mills Schwarzen 2024

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