With regard to Cartman, that critique is valid. With regard to Calvin, he is there to be the foil to Hobbes, who dispenses the wisdom. Calvin and Hobbes is a transmission of wisdom. Moreso in the later years, admittedly, but even early on. There is such a thing as the fool archetype. Frodo in LOTR, Emmet in the LEGO movie, and so on. These characters who know nothing, and are demonstrably unfit for the tasks that life demands of them, are not meant to be admired for their ignorance, rather it is their ignorance that allows the writer to send them on a journey to learn a lesson that is valuable to the audience. This is a bit harder to pinpoint in Calvin and Hobbes due to the episodic nature of a weekly strip, where the plot resets each time and the punchline almost invariably involves Calvin reverting to some stubborn point of view or refusing to learn a lesson. Yet if you read the works from beginning to end in the anthology, you can see a progression in both Calvin's attitude and the subject matter on Watterson's mind. The theme is maturation. To critique Calvin for being all that you said is to miss the point. Which, if you were a child reading them at the time (as I was!) nobody can blame you for. It might have been recieved better if your parents had been party to the reading of the strips, so they could bring forward the subtext. But anyway, it is not accurate to say that Calvin and Hobbes glorifies the anti-hero, sarcastic, childishness. Calvin is constantly lampooned and presented as being the cause of his own suffering for refusing to learn.