>> There is no such "sort of person".
Of course there is. Some people excel effortlessly, some are able to (and want to) dedicate themselves to a task and excel. Some can't excel despite effort and some cannot focus themselves to make the effort at all. We are all different. Or do you live in the kind of imaginary utopia where anyone can be the best at anything if they just apply themselves?
>> that graduation speech is about people who can excel at anything others put their mind to.
If you can excel at anything others put your mind to, simply because you want to excel (which was directly what was in the cartoon), then you can do it for anything you can put your mind to as well. This sets you up to win at life in almost any way you want to and is not something to lament.
The cartoon (to me) is about someone waking up to the fact they have choices and that they get to figure out what they want. Awesome. Good for them.
It also betrays a very naive (as you would expect from someone of that age) view of the working world and the rest of humanity and makes the assumption that all of the other people that do go to college and on to work have never had these thoughts.
>> if you can't distinguish the interesting from the idiotic assignments, and fulfill them all with equal dog-like obedience, that's not very smart
If she can excel at any task set, she's very smart and she's proved to herself she can do anything if she tries. She has a lot of life left to figure out where she wants to go.
>> Do you think people who blindly follow orders grow on trees, or are aware of the fact that's essentially all they're doing? Because I'd say no to both.
No, I think that the image of school as a robot factory and point of government control is overblown, almost to the point of a conspiracy theory.