In a recent study of the IQ of children over the last few decades in the USA, it was discovered that children on average are, according to the test, smarter today than they were fifty or sixty years ago. But this is not necessarily because we have more information or better health care (although this may play some role). Researchers determined that this increase in average IQ is probably due to the fact that children today are as a whole taught to think in different ways than children fifty or sixty years ago.

Children taking the test today aren't smarter; they are just more prepared. Children today, in many parts of the developed world, are expected to think abstractly. Children are constantly exposed to the concept that there are alternative perspectives and that they can (at least pretend) to inhabit these perspectives--in video games, in stories, in news, in online media, in musical songs and styles, in movies, clothes, role-playing games. The various perspectives available to kids today are not limited in time or place or even means of expression.

This is not to diminish the roles of more concrete forms of education; contemplating the function of religion in the public life of a federal politician would have been an impractical past time in the life of a rural farmer in the American Southwest in the early 1700s. Such contemplation might be considered equally self-indulgent if not lacking in utility in a war-torn community in the Darfur region today. Certain forms of abstract contemplation might even be a cause for general derision in contexts such as Vanketesh's Chicago community. In such circumstances there are more immediate and useful skills to acquire, and the different perspectives learned, explored or expressed are perhaps not perspectives found in any Harvard psychologist's IQ test.

But in order to reach a point where we can understand the purposes of particular concrete skills or knowledge found in different people, we need the ability to abstractly consider circumstance and context. We need to be able to consider the contexts influencing others and ourselves and be able to explain what we understand to others and ourselves, a process that requires time and sustained interaction with different and diverse individuals and societies. We require the capacity and the desire to dialogue with other individuals experiencing our own context as well as those in different contexts.

This is not quite the self-awareness advocated in Nietzsche or The Power of Now, although both are valid components in the study of context. Richard Rorty, another American philosopher, wrote that all people should read as many books and see as many movies as possible. Rorty suggested that in accumulating the stories of others, even fictional characters, individuals accumulate perspectives. Thus, while one individual may never agree with nor truly understand another individual or society, he or she will at least be aware of alternative contexts and the myriad of ways in which people can interact with their contexts.