Calvin Takes His Pills…

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Plenty of drama here at the Edelen household this week, so I don’t have much for today, but I did come across a devastating cartoon commentary yesterday:

Calvin takes his meds

Not an original (at least I don’t think it is), but the person behind this tribute nailed it. {Click on ‘toon for a larger image}

Please discuss.

16 thoughts on “Calvin Takes His Pills…

  1. Greg Smith

    This is the saddest comic strip I have ever seen. We live in a culture that has a pill for everything including jamming kids into little moulds so we can deal with them conveniently.

  2. That has to be one of the saddest cartoons I’ve seen. Of course, maybe if Calvin’s parents had spanked him, eliminated refined sugar and additives from his food, homeschooled him, and administered deliverance so he would not be so psychotic with his imaginary friend, they would not need to put him on Ritalin. 😉

    • Michael,

      Boys will be boys. I wish the medi-Nazis understood that, but we’ve been feminized to death and no one knows what a real boy is supposed to act like anymore. Funny how 99 percent of children on these drugs are boys. (Well, actually, not funny at all when you get right down to it…)

  3. Dan,

    I have always felt like Calvin was the poster boy for homeschooling. We love C & H at our house (we homeschool three) and I know several other homeschooling families that love the strip.

    Calvin has nothing but utter contempt for school as multiple strips show him daydreaming and doodling while he is in school. I would hazard to say that all the strips where Calvin is at school he is bored, unhappy, anxious, disgusted, hopeless, or aggravated. The only times he is happy is at lunch when he is grossing Susie Derkins out or at recess (that is when Moe the bully isn’t after him). His teacher is named Miss Wormwood after the apprentice devil in Lewis’ classic Screwtape Letters. That isn’t a joke the average reader of the strip likely will get. I just wonder what Watterson was trying to say about the institution?

    I’m not trying to make an ugly connection between psychotropic drugs and public school, but I don’t know of any homeschooled kids that are on them. If you’re looking for a broader societal application, I missed it. 🙂

    • Tony,

      I have an idea that Calvin would be just as much as a handful homeschooled as he would in a public school, if not more.

      I know kids on psychoactive drugs who are homeschooled.

  4. David

    Remember Harvey? There was a taxi driver in that movie that lamented the change in personality of those going to the asylum vs those leaving.

    We could all build an inside-out house like Wonko the Sane, placing everyone squarely in the Asylum, or we could focus on just how it is that God views the world.

    The truth is, we’ve become broken because we tend to focus on two words: Value and Productivity.

    If we could learn what it is that God values, and how God views the productive life, I think we might find quite a few things changing.

  5. Cristy

    More …

    I used to substitute teach in our public school elementaries. And I used to get the list of the kids “with issues” (not my words, but the administrations … ugh.)

    All of the boys on meds were the kids “with issues.”

    I’ve lost a good friend because I was brave enough to tell her that there was nothing wrong with her son and that just because a public school teacher didn’t have any patience with didn’t mean he had an attention disorder.

    All I know to do is pray.

    God’s peace, Cristy S.

    • I had a similar situation, but the results were different. I was the children’s director for a church and one the kid’s (Ryan) parents came to talk to me. I had taught Ryan every Sunday for three years. They were concern because his first grade teacher wanted to have him tested for ADD. The reason the teacher gave: the only way she could get him to focus and do his work was to seperate Ryan from everyone. I asked the parents if Ryan was upset when she seperated him, they said no it helped him get his work done. I told them that Ryan was independant learner, just give him instructions and let him go off on his own and he will do it. I told them he had teacher that either did not understand learning styles or had class too big to care that children learn differently.

      They refused to have him be tested and labeled. They transferred him to a Christian school and he did great.

  6. Malana Johansen

    As a junior high teacher, I mourn the loss of imagination in our children today. I would love having a Calvin in class just to keep things interesting. Instead I have had students who live to just “beat the game” on computers or when something goes wrong say, “Face it, Ms. J, that’s life.” I learned a long time ago to accept each student as God made him or her and love them and try to find ways to make them shine (without the silly fake self-esteem stuff). After all, God loves me, and I still like to believe that brownies came in my house as a child and made the beds and did the dishes on Sundays when we rushed to prepare for service. That’s what my mom told me and later on when my sister said it was our neighbor, I still preferred the brownies.

  7. bob pinto

    I’m 50 years old, so I can say in my day you didn’t have ADD, you were just bad. And they’d paddle you. I wasn’t put on drugs but today I would have, simply because I talked during class. ( Horrors!)

    I scooped too much sugar on cereal like Calvin.

    (Cheerios were great. The hard surface and holes of the cereal allowed the sugar to fall to the bottom of the bowl, more so than corn flakes, so it produced a really intense slurry.)

    Kids who wanted favor with the teacher did it less with academic achievement and more with snitching. (Tattling.)

    With Calvin, whatever way possible to not deal with him is acceptable. And if the teacher has contempt for him so will his classmates.

    The better teachers of my day challenged me to be creative and I did so!

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