Your entire life can represent a short term context. It goes away when you do. You use your life time add to your context to do/learn whatever, but it's finite, and it ends.
If you weren't prompted by your parents, schools, teachers. Then you wouldn't be acquiring knowledge either. The most you'd be acquiring without that advanced prompting would be bugs in the woods to eat.
Ah, you have some serious gaps in your understanding of how human minds work. Life experiences are not just a "short term context" - they are used to actually refine the network within the human brain. Your life experiences do not just live in a single stream with access mediated by attention.
Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory as a starting point. I recommended reading through some information on development psychology too, that will help clear up these misunderstandings. Hope that helps!
By that logic engineers don't understand flying because planes don't flap their wings like birds. Not everything has to work the same to meet your arbitrary criteria for intelligence and reasoning.
If you weren't prompted by your parents, schools, teachers. Then you wouldn't be acquiring knowledge either. The most you'd be acquiring without that advanced prompting would be bugs in the woods to eat.