Homeschooling debates usually center on academics or values alignment. Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen, teaching Rav Wolbe, raises a different concern entirely — one about social muscle.
School, for all its frustrations, exposes children daily to people who are inconvenient. Classmates who annoy them. Teachers who aren’t a perfect match. Friendships that require real effort to maintain. Kelemen’s point is that this constant low-grade friction is doing something valuable: it’s building a child’s capacity to deal with people who aren’t easy — a skill every adult needs for the rest of their life, in marriages, workplaces, and communities.
If a family homeschools — and Kelemen is clear this can absolutely be the right decision for a given family, guided by their own Rov — that particular muscle simply won’t get built the same way, unless something else replaces it. A homeschooled child surrounded only by convenient, hand-picked social interactions may reach adulthood without the same practiced ability to navigate people who are difficult, unfair, or simply not a good fit.
This isn’t an argument against homeschooling. It’s an argument for awareness. Every chinuch choice trades one set of strengths for another, and Kelemen’s approach throughout his teaching is to name the trade-off honestly rather than pretend one option has no cost.
**If you homeschool, or are considering it, here’s how to compensate for what won’t happen automatically:**
1. **Deliberately build in social friction.** Co-ops, group classes, team sports, or community programs where your child has to navigate personalities they didn’t choose.
2. **Don’t rescue too quickly.** When your child comes home frustrated with a difficult peer, resist smoothing it over instantly — let them practice working through it with your coaching, not your intervention.
3. **Name the skill explicitly.** Talk to your child directly about the fact that getting along with difficult people is a skill, like any other, and that you’re helping them practice it on purpose.
4. **Check in with your Rov or mentor periodically.** Chinuch decisions aren’t one-time; revisit whether your current setup is still serving your specific child as they grow.
Whether your children are in school or at home, the underlying goal is the same: raising kids who can function — not just survive, but thrive — around people who aren’t easy. That’s a muscle worth building somewhere, on purpose.
For more of Rabbi Kelemen’s thoughtful, real-world Torah guidance on chinuch decisions like this one, join the inner circle at lawrencekelemen.com.
This blog was co-written with Artificial Intelligence.