Learning orientations and political bias

Later this week I'll be joining fellow ISW'ers Jennifer Morton and Harry Brighouse for a conference on "Education: Ideals and Practices." It looks to be a great event, and I thought I'd share my paper with our readers. I'd welcome any feedback you might have. The paper draws on a fair amount of empirical research about learning and personality, but it was motivated by my own observation that students' political beliefs map onto personality differences that shape how students learn.

Here's the abstract:

Anti-Conservative Bias in Education is Real — But Not Unjust

Conservatives commonly claim that systems of formal education are biased against conservative ideology. I argue that this claim is incorrect, but not because there is no bias against conservatives in formal education. A wide swath of psychological evidence linking personality and ideology indicates that conservatives and liberals differ in their learning orientations, that is, in the values, motivations, and beliefs they bring to learning tasks. These differences in operative epistemologies explain many demographic phenomena relating educational achievement and political ideology. Systems of formal education thus disadvantage conservatives, especially in the later stages of formal education. Conservatives are therefore ‘selected against’ in the process of formal education, not due to their values or ideology but because their learning orientations are not especially conducive to academic success beyond a certain point. However, because the bias against conservatives in not ideological in origin, a case cannot be made that conservatives are victims of institutional injustice. This bias against conservatives in formal education could be mitigated were the purposes of formal education radically modified (the education of the military class in Plato’s Republic serves as a model). But such a model of formal education would ill serve the needs of modern, industrialized, information-driven societies.