Last weekend I had the privilege of attending a 3 day conference in Bregenz on modern forms of education “Greenhouses of the future“. My two older daughters now attend school, my wife hast just started working as a teacher. The more I learn about education the more I am struck by paradox: All experts agree on how children should be taught: Each child individually according to his or her level of proficiency in a given subject. Yet what we see in schools all over the world is a far cry from that: 30 children of roughly the same age all being fed the same lesson at the same time by one teacher.

The struggles in education remind me a lot of the struggles that the 80s saw in manufacturing and we have been seeing the last 10 years in software development:  How to go from large batch sizes to a batch size of one. From large yearly releases to daily releases. From large work packages to small stories. The exciting thing is that in all of these domains there are great examples of companies who have successfully made the switch to “lean thinking”: Toyota and Porsche in manufacturing, 37signals and the Omni Group in software.

We here at conject have also progressed far along that road. Of course there is always one more goal further ahead, one step we can and will be better tomorrow. But that’s what the most important lean practice of “Kaizen” is for – getting better every day.

In education also many shining examples exist, that it is possible to teach in a “batch size” of one. In Munich alone there are over ten Montessori schools where individual instruction for a single child is practiced every day. I just hope – for the sake of all coming generations – that we find the strength to reform our school systems quickly to follow the unanimous advice of the experts: Teach each child individually!