Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for December 04, 2009

Welcome to the real world Calvin.

What is it you wish to know?

What an enlightening thought!!

That question ranks right up there with why do we pay a doctor or dentist to give us pain?

They never teach you what you want to know because they know you’ll learn it soon enough on your own.

Then perhaps Calvin, you should pay more attention in class.

Where is that nasty virus when you need it?

It floated down a drain?

I’m waiting for the Morton Salt girl to come along and save him.

I have so little sympathy for you, Calvin (except for the rain bit - I hate rain). I was much more like Susie, eager to learn and to make new friends. You have that ability too - but your stubborn selfishness drives it right out of you.

GrinsToYa is right. Find out yourself. There are good social reasons to go to school. Have fun. If you pick up some education then that’s great but you’re just there to get into higher education or a trade. After you have graduated or gotten qualified or certified or whatever THEN you can learn.

what he wants to know is how to make TNT out of common household detergent and stuff like that.. Just imagine if Calvin had access to Google

You will Calvin, and you will learn such wonderous things.

@Downeasta - you are either a teacher or they have a different primary educational system on your planet…

LOL! I agree with Johanan, I hate the rain as well… School never bothered me much…

Calvin should be grateful he doesn’t have nuns in his school. They used capital punishment back then.

What do you want to learn then?

That’s the thing about schools, Calvin. There is so much to know that they don’t teach. But then there is so much that they are supposed to teach and don’t.

I finally figured out that school isn’t so much about WHAT you learn…it’s really more about teaching you HOW to learn.

At least that’s the mindset that got me through undergrad and grad school (grin)…

right now we’re passing through the best time period of calvin and hobbes. 1988-1991.

School is where you learn far more than you think you’re learning – not only some of the basics of how to get on in the world (so we can spend our time reading comics, for example), but also some basics in getting along in society. And frankly, I loved school because it let me explore so many options for my future. It’s just that so much of it depends on that ineffable combination of teacher, student and parents.

They never teach you what you want to know in class! But you need what they teach to learn what you want!

I reckon it is a good morning to be judgemental.

The artwork is supurb, especially the second panel.

@Applescruff – I think you mean corporal punishment. They didn’t let the nuns KILL children, even if they wanted too. But I agree with the rain sentiment. Hated waiting for the bus. Buzzdog & lonewolf said it best

I didn’t learn what I wanted to learn until the very last year of University.

Some of the most profound questions of the universe.

Teaching you HOW to learn is important, but it works better when you learn things that are useful and practical. The “journey” itself should be fun.

A Sunday Calvin strip decorated my home bulletin board for many years, the one ending with, “If nobody makes you do it, it counts as fun.” It was the motto of our – for want of a better word – home school. One of the first things my son learned to read were Calvin books; he’d read them aloud into a tape recorder :-)

HelmetHead

I like your avatar. Do you think Calvin and Danae would make good partners in ruling the world?

Calvin speaks the truth…

Ah… The wisdom of the ages while still in it’s infancy? Take Two

I just adore them!!

I so sympathize with Calvin. I absolutely hated school until college. I knew, even as a child, when I was being forced to learn things that would be useless to me thoughout my entire life. And I’ve yet to be proven wrong.

I wonder what it is exactly Calvin wants to know in school that they’re not teaching him?

When I watch television trivia shows like “Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?”, “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” and “Cash Cab” … it makes me feel sad at all the things they apparently AREN’T teaching kids in school anymore these days that they used to and should STILL be teaching, like American history, geography, etc. (I left “Jeopardy!” off the above list because those contestants actually do have to be smart enough to be on it, unlike the other ones).

People don’t seem to know anything these days except how to blurb meaningless bleeep on places like Twitter! I mean, why do they think anyone would care that, at this moment in time, they’re eating a PB&J sandwich or going to the bathroom?!?!?

Wait until you’re a teenager. You’ll know it all then.

i never had a school bus to ride to school as we lived .95 miles from the school so i had to walk which made it worse

if you lived here that amount of rain might have added up to a lot of snow and you might have had a snow day

school became boring when they started teaching in order to pass standardized tests

bleeep of

I don’t think kids have the challenges that make learning fun. I agree about standardized tests. Education should be practical. I still know how to diagram a sentence, OH BROTHER, I use it every day, NOT! By the way, I grew up in a little logging town in the Cascades in Oregon. I often waited for the bus in cascading rain - real northwesterners don’t mind it. We love our green and we love it when CA imports whine about it!.

Hey GretchensMom…

He wants to learn why he doesn’t want to go to places he doesn’t like going (like school). That’s why it’s so funny.

Macushlalondra said, about 11 hours ago

That question ranks right up there with why do we pay a doctor or dentist to give us pain?~~~~and why would we go to someone who calls it “Practice”? I don’t want someone practicing on me.

One word….”profound”. No wait, that’s three words.

Calvin, these are the three most important things they want to teach you, shut up, get in line, and do as you’re told—NOW.

I just love that middle panel. The depiction of rain using just black ink on white paper is amazingly done there. I think Watterson commented in a later book that this was one of his favorites also. A great example of why color is not always a better thing for daily strips.

:)

Kid, welcome to life…

Im the only stupid one that reads this strip I cant remember a thing I learned till about grade 6

O yes home schooling does have a down side grade 2 to 4 Then really enjoyed learning after that Calvin will change his ways ,maybe make us all proud of him

The forgetting curve is real. We don’t remember much in the world of facts. It’s attitudes that stick with us. In school, we should learn that learning is fun. Alas, Calvin is on a very wrong track. But it was school that did it to him.

Who or what is that ‘thing’ peeking out of the underbrush in the center pic ??

Looks like a fire hydrant to me?

I believe it’s a fire hydrant.

Johanan Rakkav, I don’t know how many Calvin and Hobbes strips you’re read, but I think you misinterpret Calvin as a character. He does not “choose to be ignorant,” nor is he intentionally antisocial.

He hates school not because of some hate of learning, but because of the arbitrary structure. He is shown to be highly intelligent but very unmotivated. Instead of grappling problems that he doesn’t see uses for yet (math, etc) he spends his time thinking about the philosophies that apply directly to his life and decision making process. His teachers could have him working his butt off on math if they taught him through subjects he enjoys (rocket/space travel story problems).

As for the social side of school, he doesn’t appear social because he doesn’t relate to people around him. That’s not the same as not wanting to make friends. To him (and myself) sacrificing one’s own interests to be social doesn’t make sense (see the storyline about baseball). Calvin thinks independently far more than most people (adults included), so of course he doesn’t know how to relate to people who don’t. He never seems to be able to quite understand Moe, for example, because Moe seems completely devoid of morals. While Calvin, on the other, hand, obsesses over morals. His only friend in school is Susan, who is apparently the best student in their class. He is still a little kid and unable to relate to her (expect through teasing), but he likes her because she is such an avid thinker and learner. The main difference in their attitudes is only that Calvin wants to learn only what he wants to learn, while Susan just wants to learn anything she can.

As the mother of a boy, I think Bill Watterson is a genius. Calvin is an “Everyboy.”

So very true Calvin, so very true!

HelmetHead,

You aren’t Canadian, by chance, are you? And if you are, have you heard of a band called Great Big Sea? Or are you just really into hockey?

everyone asks that same question,and everyone gets the same answer.

I don’t agree with you in principle, Humdum. I’ve read Calvin and Hobbes front to back and for many years. I’ve seen every strip BW has ever put out. And my impression - the impression the cartoonist has gone on record as stating is his intent - is that most of the time, Calvin creates his own problems. That’s what motivates the humor. He does things that Bill W. has said he’d never approve of.

Calvin and I were very much alike as personalities at that age. Very, VERY much. The salient difference is that I wasn’t as radically selfish as he is. Calvin has no excuse - NONE - for not making himself more than he is. We ENFPs naturally rebel against artificial structures; we learn best when we learn on our own. But guess what? No artificial structure then or since has ever hindered me from learning what I wanted to learn. Nor has it stopped me from being social and (as far as I understood it) polite.

Calvin has everything he needs to adapt to his circumstances and be a truly brilliant, caring, imaginative child. The reason he isn’t…is that it wouldn’t be funny. But in real life, Calvin’s life would be a Grade AAA tragicomedy, and most of that would be his fault.

They don’t teach useful things like demolition in elementary school.

I barely learned anything at school. Most of my knowledge comes from elsewhere.

Calvin does seem to have a lot of problems, but I don’t think he creates them himself. He remains his childlike imaginative nature while at the same time analyzing the confusions he has about the world. I think that’s what distinguishes Calvin from normal adults (despite being a child): that his curiosity isn’t afraid to question. We tend to lose that curiosity as we age, slowly accepting the world as it is.

Luckily we had neighbors at the end of the street by the bus stop that would let us use their front porch on bad weather mornings. One morning it was pouring and we all piled on the front porch at about 7:20AM waiting for the bus. We were unaware that the previous owners had moved to Florida and left or sold their house to a young couple, who had moved in over the weekend. We scared them out of a sound sleep with all our noisy feet and talking that early in the morning and they scared us coming out yelling at us for being on their porch. The older couple were early risers and sometimes would come out with pitchers of hot cocoa and cups on windy, snowy mornings and urge us to come over and warm up. The older couple were the ones who invited us on the first bad weather day years before. The younger couple were never thrilled with our being there but checked with the older couple on the tradition and I have a feeling were related and were told to be nice to us.

Sorry, SaraCVT, not Canadian. Helmet Head is what Danae’s horse, Lucy, calls her sometimes, and as a horsewoman myself who NEVER rides without one, I just love the name.

A marriage between Calvin and Danae would produce Lio.

life suck sometimes…!!

I never meant to imply that Calvin is a great person or good company. I was saying that his problems with school and being social aren’t caused by any inherent flaw in Calvin. Like with so many people, it’s a matter of growing up and figuring out the “why”s for himself. He can learn something useful from school, but as I said, that’s something that’s not yet apparent to him. (It may have been apparent to you, since you say you wanted to learn it. I was also eager to learn through my first few years of school; there was so much I wanted to be able to do. If I hadn’t had outside motivations though, I would have hated being “forced” to learn.) The same principle applies to his social life: He alienates himself because he can’t understand other people (he’s not properly objective yet). Neither of these make him irredeemable.