Personality, like physical traits, appears to be genetic. Psychology has done a tremendous disservice to the study of personality popularizing tests to make the public think that personality is merely a group of four or five traits that manifest themselves as dominant or passive. Personality is so much more robust than this that a comparison of such a four-trait personality test to the time when the earth was thought of as flat is absolutely the right comparison.
Personality is a set of driving forces behind the decisions people make when learning anything. What fields of knowledge people choose to build up for themselves and what fields they choose to discard is ruled by these driving forces. They determine what motivations are near to people's hearts and which ones are not. They guide which outside motivations cause people to respond positively to certain learnings and which ones cause people to resist other learnings. They drive people toward natural proclivities that go beyond interest to form talent bases. They even help determine which personalities in other people students want to respect enough to learn from and which they want to ignore.
How much does personality play into the current state of affairs of education? Nothing discernible. It's part of the level playing field that public schools want to create in the name of equal opportunity. The schools will educate a person with the same curriculum one step at a time for 13 years regardless of race, gender, creed, socioeconomic status and personality, a view that keeps the dropout rate around 40%.
Personality consists of driving forces, genetically controlled. Educators controlling the public schools could not be more mistaken.
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