Students in affluent settings already have access to extensive human assistance: small seminars, writing conferences, office hours, peer review sessions, tutoring centers. For them, the question of AI assistance is genuinely about whether to add another form of support to an already rich ecosystem. They can afford to be selective, to worry about overdependence, to preserve “authentic struggle” as a pedagogical value. Students in under-resourced settings have no such luxury. They face teachers managing 150 students, classrooms where individual attention is structurally impossible, schools where conversation has been replaced by recitation and writing conferences exist only in theory. For them, AI assistance isn’t an addition to robust human support. It’s the first time anyone has had the capacity to engage their tentative interpretations, to ask follow-up questions, to treat their thinking as worth developing.