Philosopher Stephen Law:
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A while ago I watched a wildlife documentary about Komodo dragons poisoning, tracking for a week or so, and then, finally, when their victim became too weak to defend itself, disembowelling and eating alive, a water buffalo.  
The cameraman said this had been his first ever wildlife assignment, and it would probably also be his last, because he couldn’t cope with the depth of suffering he had been forced to witness. That was just one poor creature.
Each day, millions of animals are similarly forced to tear each other limb from limb to survive. And this has been going on for hundreds of millions of years.
​This is, in many ways, a beautiful world. But it’s also a staggeringly cruel and horrific world for very many of its inhabitants. 
​Unspeakable horror on an almost unimaginably vast scale is built into the very fabric of the world...

If one cannot focus one cannot learn. Poverty, tragedy and disease can be fatal to being able to increase knowledge and progress in learning. Without the support and resources the fragile reed that is human will sink beneath the waters. Some people in privileged positions forget this most obvious truth, it is not that they are so naturally  talented but they have had support and resources that they did not even notice or realize and therefore think that others are inferior. It is not surprising that the human ego would turn away from this.  As Stephen Jay Gould wrote, "I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."

​LA TIMES:
The findings, published in Friday's edition of the journal Science, indicate that an urgent need — making rent, getting money for food — tugs at the attention so much that it can reduce the brainpower of anyone who experiences it, regardless of innate intelligence or personality.
​There's a widespread tendency to assume that poor people don't have money because they are lazy, unmotivated or just not that sharp, said study coauthor Sendhil Mullainathan, a behavioral economist at Harvard University. "That's a broad narrative that's pretty common," Mullainathan said. "Our intuition was quite different: It's not that poor people are any different than rich people, but that being poor in itself has an effect...
Almost like a computer that has some other process running the background, poverty creates this nagging background process and that could itself have an effect on actual cognitive capacity," Mullainathan said.

Negative Stress Impedes Learning, Memory and Performance
A child in a constant state of unmanaged stress is primarily focused on survival. "Continual emotional distress can create deficits in a child's intellectual abilities, crippling the capacity to learn" (Goleman, p.27).

The Powerful Impact of Stress, John Hopkins School of Education