In my opinion, there is no better decision Jewish parents can make for their children’s education than a Jewish day school. Any denomination, any pedagogy, so long as it takes Jewish peoplehood and Jewish wisdom seriously.

The most common objection I hear? I don’t want my kids growing up in a bubble. They should be in the real world.

Ashok Sinha/Adobe Stock

Illustrative.

This article is my retort.

I was born in Israel and immigrated to the U.S. with my family when I was three. I grew up in Alabama. (Alabama! Imagine the culture shock.) I went to public school my entire life. At the time, the Jewish community of Auburn had, to my knowledge, three Jews in the entire school system. Not the grade. Not the school. The system. My brother and I were two of them.

At home, I learned who the Jewish people were — about Zionism, Jewish wisdom, Jewish values. I was bar mitzvahed (in Columbus, Georgia, nearly an hour away). I studied a little. And by the time I was 18, I was serious about being a Jew yet Jewishly illiterate. I knew more about what I wasn’t than who I wanted to be. I spent decades learning what my teenage children, who went to Jewish day school, already have. 

That is what this article is about.

The backdrop now is even harder than it was a generation ago. Children today are growing up more connected and more alone at the same time: more anxious, more online and with fewer places where they feel steady and sure of themselves. Today the question isn’t only whether your children learn algebra and biology; it’s where they will be known, where they will belong and where they will grow into adults who know who they are.

What surprises people is that a compelling answer has little to do with religion; the case for Jewish day school can be made without it. (We’ll discuss what Jewish wisdom — a gift many parents never think to ask for — adds in my next article.) 

The first concern for many parents is that a Jewish school means trading down academically. The reality tends to surprise them. One day school parent in Atlanta admitted he’d assumed they were sacrificing academic rigor in choosing a Jewish school for his son, and found himself pleasantly surprised as he watched graduates year after year get into the colleges they were aiming for, with test scores that stood up against the best public and private schools.

This isn’t unique to one exceptional school. Consider two examples from different Jewish communities. At David Posnack Jewish Day School in Davie, Florida, the Class of 2024 earned acceptances to colleges including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, the University of Chicago, and NYU. In suburban Atlanta, the Weber School’s graduating classes of 2023 through 2026 earned acceptances to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, Duke, the University of California, Berkeley, Washington University in St. Louis, Emory, Georgia Tech, Tufts and many other outstanding colleges and universities. A Jewish day school hardly closes those doors.

And even if the Ivy League isn’t your child’s goal, and for most children it isn’t, that’s exactly the point. The door stays open. These graduates can go wherever they want to go, whether that’s a state flagship, a small liberal-arts college, an arts or technical path or, for those who want it, the Ivy League. A big part of it is the dual curriculum: day school students carry both secular and Judaic studies, picking up a second or third language along the way, and learn early how to work through a difficult text and argue with it. Those are durable academic habits, and many graduates arrive at college well prepared for the jump.

So let’s turn to the only outstanding question that matters: What is actually best for your child, not only their college prospects? 

Children flourish when they’re known by caring adults, surrounded by stable friendships, rooted in a community and given a clear sense of who they are and where they belong — the very conditions  Jonathan Haidt, in The Anxious Generation, argues modern childhood has been quietly stripping away. It’s increasingly where developmental psychology has landed. 

Jewish day schools didn’t set out to become well-designed environments for raising children in the 21st century. They simply held onto what children need most while much of the culture let it go. These schools work because they provide three things that have become scarce in modern childhood: children who are known, children who belong and children who grow up with a clear sense of who they are. 

Here’s how.

Your child will be known

One of the most important factors in whether a child thrives is whether the adults in the building actually see them. Small classes make that possible: teachers can tailor their methods to each student rather than expecting the student to fit the curriculum. No child disappears in the back row. The shy one gets drawn out and the bored one gets pushed. The child having a hard week gets noticed before it becomes a bad month. Teachers know their students, and students know their teachers.

Being genuinely known by your teachers and surrounded by a stable peer group may be one of the most valuable things a school can offer a child right now. Your child won’t just be educated. They’ll be held by those invested in their success.

Independent schools also decide who’s in the room. Every parent understands that children become like the people they spend their years beside. The social scientist Nicholas Christakis, of Yale, has spent a career showing how habits, norms, and aspirations spread through the people we’re connected to. Your child’s friends will shape them. That isn’t in question. What you’re deciding is which friends, and what they’re all becoming together. 

A strong secular private school can match much of what we’ve covered so far. Small classes, serious academics, a child who’s genuinely known — none of that is unique to a Jewish school, and if it’s the whole of what you’re after, the secular school across town may be a fine choice, and you should weigh it seriously. But being known is table stakes for any good independent school. There are things a Jewish day school does that no secular school can match at any tuition: a child who belongs without having to be the different one in the room, a whole family folded into a community for life, and the quiet confidence that comes from knowing exactly who you are.

Your child gets to belong

A generation or two ago, community came almost for free. It was in the neighborhood where everyone knew your children, the congregation down the street, the civic clubs and the bowling leagues, the cousins and grandparents within driving distance. A child was held by a dense web of people without anyone having to arrange it.

That web has thinned. Families move away for work, and grandparents end up a plane ride instead of a street away. The congregations and clubs that once gathered people have emptied out, and a childhood’s worth of connection has migrated online; about half of teenagers now spend four or more hours a day on screens, the CDC reports. The result is hundreds of contacts and startlingly few places where a child is deeply known. Today’s parents don’t inherit a community; they have to build one on purpose. A school that hands your child a real one isn’t offering a Jewish extra. It’s an answer to one of the defining problems of modern childhood.

And there’s a particular version of belonging a day school provides that’s easy to miss until it’s gone: the relief of a child who simply gets to be normal. In most schools, a Jewish child is the Jewish child — the one who explains why they’re out for the holidays, who fields the questions, who quietly represents an entire people in every conversation about Israel or antisemitism. That’s a constant tax on a child, and since Oct. 7, 2023 many parents have felt just how heavy it’s become.

A day school lifts that burden. The holidays are everyone’s holidays, the calendar is theirs, the rhythm of the place is their own. Your child isn’t the different one here — they’re home. They get to spend their formative years not performing or defending an identity, but just living, with all the attention that frees up for friendship, curiosity, and joy. For a lot of children, that’s the difference between enduring school and loving it.

There’s a deeper form of belonging here, too, that most children today grow up without: the felt sense of being part of something older and larger than themselves — a people, a story, a chain that runs back hundreds of generations. It’s one of the quieter losses of modern childhood, hard to name until you meet a child who has it. They tend to be harder to knock off balance. A day school hands a child that inheritance early, as a birthright, rather than leaving it as something they might go looking for later, if they ever do.

You’re not choosing a school — you’re choosing an ecosystem

Belonging doesn’t stop at your child. Most schools give your child an education; very few give your whole family a community.

When you enroll, your whole family joins something. It starts with your child’s friendships and quickly becomes your own — the other parents who become your closest friends. It’s the rabbis and mentors who know your child for years and show up at the moments that matter. It’s the meals that arrive after a birth, a death, an illness, and without anyone having to ask. Later, it becomes the internship that comes through a classmate’s parent, the professional network that opens doors a decade out, even the weddings where half the room met in kindergarten.

In a culture where so many families feel atomized and alone, that ecosystem is one of the most valuable things you can hand a child, and one of the hardest to find anywhere else. You’re not buying 12 years of schooling. You’re joining a community of relationships that follows your child for life.

Confidence comes from knowing who you are

Every parent wants a confident child. Real confidence has nothing to do with being told you’re special. It comes from knowing who you are, where you belong, and what you stand for — and those happen to be exactly the things a day school spends twelve years building. A child with those things needs less from strangers. Less of the validation that pulls children toward the phone and the follower count, toward the approval of a room they’ll never actually see.

Most schools teach children what to think about and how to score well. Few teach them how to be a person. Day schools build ethics into the day itself, not as a poster on the wall but as something students spend years discussing and practicing. They come out having absorbed a simple, unfashionable idea: that a life is measured not only by what you achieve, but by what you owe other people.

You don’t have to be religious to want that. Any parent — secular, atheist, culturally Jewish, whatever — wants a child who is kind, who shows up for people, and who has a spine about right and wrong. A child who knows what they believe and has somewhere they unmistakably belong moves through the world differently. That’s the kind of confidence that doesn’t crack under pressure.

Which brings us to the most common objection I’ve heard parents raise.

Yes, it’s a bubble

“I don’t want my child in a bubble,” say many parents. They picture a greenhouse, warm and protected and a little artificial, and worry their children won’t be ready for the real world. Secular school feels like the braver, more open choice.

But the fear rests on the assumption that the way you prepare a child for a world full of difference is to immerse them in it as early as possible. It sounds obviously right. It treats exposure and preparation as the same thing, and they aren’t. A child dropped into difference before they’re secure in who they are doesn’t necessarily become worldly — they often become anxious, or malleable, forever managing how they’re seen by others. The child who first knows exactly who they are is the one who can later walk into a room full of difference and engage it without fear and without dissolving into it. Security isn’t the opposite of openness. It’s the precondition for it.

So let’s concede it: Of course it’s a bubble. But childhood is supposed to be a protected environment. The purpose of a greenhouse is not to keep a plant inside forever — it’s to make it strong enough to survive outside. Training wheels come off; the whole point of the protection is the day it’s no longer needed. The only question that matters is whether yours prepares a child to thrive once it’s gone.

Besides, the alternative isn’t a bubble-free childhood. Every childhood is a bubble of some kind. A suburban public school is a bubble. An elite private school is a bubble. A rural school is a bubble. A secular school isn’t “the real world”; it’s just a different bubble, one where your child absorbs a particular set of assumptions about what matters and how to live, mostly by default and rarely examined. Every parent is choosing a bubble for their child whether they realize it or not. The only real decision is whether you pick one on purpose — for its people, its values, and the kind of adult it tends to turn out — or let one get picked for you.

On that question, the evidence is not subtle. When researchers followed Jewish students onto college campuses — about the hardest real-world test a young person faces right now — day-school graduates didn’t fold. In a Prizmah analysis of data from a Tufts University survey of Jewish college students, day-school alumni were more than twice as likely (81% vs. 35%) to say their Jewish identity is very important to them, twice as likely to engage in campus Jewish life regularly (53% vs. 23%), and far more likely to feel “very close” to a community (56% vs. 19%). A separate study following graduates of Jewish day schools in the United Kingdom into university found that students’ resilience in the face of hostility drew on a foundation of identity, community, and civic awareness built at school.

The Prizmah analysis also found that day school students scored higher in civic knowledge and volunteering and were more likely to remain involved in their communities after graduating. These students don’t retreat from the wider world — they engage it more.

So here’s the real choice. This was never really about safety versus exposure, or insularity versus openness. The real question is whether your child grows up known, intellectually stretched, morally grounded, free to simply belong and woven into a community for life — and then meets the world standing up straight.

The bubble you’re afraid of is the very thing that equips them to leave it.

David Zalik is the co-founder of the Zalik Foundation, which has invested more than $200 million in Jewish education, thriving Jewish communities, Israel and families in need.