> And so I wonder, can we design learning environments where the learner bootstraps their own understanding from a limited input without continuous feedback from an expert or teacher?

Yes, and we do it all the time.

We can just do a lot better with continuous feedback. (And AI probably could, too, if experts that could communicate fast enough not to be a huge drag on the AIs training cycles were available. But since with current technology once we've trained an AI of the type we can make today, we can replicate it, that's not really important; if ever developed AIs that depend on reconfigurable hardware without trivially extractable state, that may change.)