Perhaps the act of learning is its own reward? Whether they get to use that knowledge to amass material goods to make life easier is of secondary importance. I know that sounds idealistic, especially given the (assumed) fact that your students probably have far more pressing concerns than gaining happiness from reading and understanding Shakespeare. But if they can retreat from any of the ugliness in their world to a mental space of their own which gives them happiness, wouldn't that be worth it to them? I'm kind of thinking along the lines of what Andy Dufresne told other inmates in "The Shawshank Redemption" about taking Mozart and Bach, etc., with him into the hole (solitary confinement). It's the thing 'they' can never take away from you.

What subjects are you tutoring? What ages are these kids?

[edit] You could also make the point that even if the subject itself won't give them any particular happiness (I heard a rumor that some people don't derive pleasure from abstract mathematics, but I don't really believe it), rising to the challenge and overcoming it certainly will. Not to mention the self-confidence it will give them, and how that self-confidence can feed into every other part of their lives.

peretz:
I didn't take your comments out of context. One minute you said there was "never" a reason to steal, then you agreed with a reason I gave. You can talk about specifics and generalizations, but a specific would have to fit into a generalization for that generalization to be true. Where 'p' = the proposition 'it is morally ok to steal'
You cannot have 'p' and '~p'. You can have 'p' and sometimes '~p'.

And what makes you think this is a normal society? Have you looked around lately? My point being, I'm sure the Germans found life under the Nazis to be quite "normal." It's all about perspective.

Look at it this way - a corporation is created entirely for the purpose of profit. It doesn't care for the individual, it doesn't think, care about the environment, life, death, or anything else that a living thing does. The only purpose of a corporation is to turn things into little green pieces of paper for the share holders, without self-destructing - no set of morals are needed. However, they are granted the same rights as the individual. And then they start controlling vast quantities of land. And then they silence any oposition to them. They push aside and bury criticisms with a public relations department. They bombard you with advertisements invading your mental space that should be private. They hijack the culture replacing it with meaningless junk that will never fullfill the needs of human hapiness. and on and on and on...

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think that falls under the category of "extraordinary situation."