I was only using them as representative examples of well known famous ball players. I actually do not recall the specific players Feynman used in his argument. Who they specifically are is irrelevant anyway.

Maybe it's a bad analogy all around. No analogy is perfect.

It's the point, though. And I'll give some personal examples.

There were classes I did well in, and classes I did badly in. It wasn't that I couldn't do the work. I simply wasn't interested. Those classes I had great interest in I excelled, at least as far as I was allowed.

Case 1 - senior physics. In the extreme example the week we were studying the electromagnetic spectrum I dozed all week except to watched the videos. Come Friday I aced the test. The next highest grade was an 80%. The teacher graded on a curve and had to throw mine out to make it 'fairer' to the other students.
I got a reputation after that. I don't recall exactly but I'm pretty sure I got an A- for the year. (I excelled in nearly all of my science courses and was often recognized by the teachers for such)

Case 2 - economics. I got a D-. It wasn't that I couldn't do the work. It wasn't that I didn't understand it. It wasn't that I couldn't learn it. I passed the tests with decent grades. What held me back was I simply wasn't interested enough to bother doing the final term paper.

Case 3 - My math education stopped at Algebra II. No trig. No calc. I've picked up stuff since. Trig is actually easy. Calc I could use a class to get the details but I understand the concepts.

I recall back in like 5th or 6th grade having an issue with the concept that dividing by zero is undefined. For some reason at the time I intuited that the answer should be infinity. But, I accepted "undefined" as the right answer as that's what I was taught.

Decades later I was perusing a calculus book trying to learn on my own. First chapter discusses the concept of the limit. The main example showed that as the denominator approached zero, the answer approached infinity. What's that term they use in Britain that's become popular in recent decades? "gobsmacked"?

I guess maybe the math teacher didn't know the answer themselves or know any better, but probably the better answer to give would have been, "Brian, you are right to have guessed that infinity is the correct answer, but you won't learn that concept until you take calculus when you get older. For now just accept undefined as the answer we're looking for."

The reason my math didn't go past AlgII in high school was because I had to retake the class. My junior year I was acing math but then got sick and missed over a week of school. I got no help catching up and ended up failing the first semester. Ironically I got like a B+ the second semester. SO I had to retake the first semester in my senior year, otherwise I would have been in trig or calc.

As a funny side-note, since I had passed the 2nd semester AlgII already I did not have to take it again, but because of moving from different schools I lacked that schools phys-ed credits. My last semester of my senior year I had to take two concurrent PE classes.

After high school I did technical school for electronics engineering. 2 hours lecture, 2 lab, 5 days a week year round. Even though this was an "accelerated course" where I would have had an AS in two and a BS in three years, I was kicked out in my second year for getting into trouble. Again, I was bored. I was unchallenged. I often turned in all five days of lab assignments for the week on Tuesday. So the rest of the week I goofed off, and got in trouble. My overall GPA was 3.8 out of 4.0.

I guess maybe I hold a bit of a grudge against the educational system. But I have realized as I've gotten older and learned stuff on my own that I was held back in many ways. I was not given the chance to push forward in those classes I excelled at. And in those classes I did poorly in, it was because I was bored and unchallenged.

OK, so this has been my personal experience with the system. I went to both private and public schools. Maybe it works just fine for others or most. But I honestly have to wonder how many people who were similar to me and likely even better, who have gone nowhere because they were forced to conform to the lowest common denominator.

How many Einstein's or Feynman's or Hawking's do we have laboring away in some cubicle pushing papers, all the while suspecting they could be something more?

Brian