Context and Learning

Everything I have ever read on learning has highlighted the point that learning in context is always better than learning in abstract. Memory improvement techniques leverage context and association as a way of learning lists of objects. Books that teach you do something will always use an example that people can relate to. A post on Hacker News gives credibility to this.

The ability to abstract an idea and generalize it to another context is where the real power is though. Decomposing an idea and distilling it is a skill worth improving.