high-road-transfer

High-road transfer is when you carry a method or principle from one situation to a very different one — not because the two situations are similar, but because you deliberately abstracted the principle and recognized where it applies.

The transfer-of-learning literature (Perkins and Salomon) distinguishes two roads: low-road transfer (a practiced skill generalizes automatically to similar contexts) and high-road transfer (the learner mindfully abstracts a principle and carries it to a far context). High-road transfer is harder and rarer — it requires deliberate abstraction — but it is the only road that crosses between dissimilar fields. The carpenter who knows why joints hold (the method) can apply it to a new wood, but must still learn the new wood's grain (the content). The method transfers; the content does not.