Is Learning Ideas the Road to General Skills?

A number is still a number, whether it's spoken or written down. A person hearing a problem that they previously saw written therefore would be unable to solve it. The problems that can transfer are those which require the same mental operations needed to solve them. These mental operations are all quite specific, but they can be abstract. So another way of putting this is that ideas, still an idea, as a more abstract general notion, can influence your thinking on a wider range of problems than a procedure that you memorize.