Basically, in principle it’s great. Children drive themselves and follow what they’re passionate about (with a teacher’s encouragement). If they’ve got a tendency for math, for example, the teacher helps them develop their own intuitions and keeps those pathways open for them.
In practice, my son believed there was a limit on his abilities to develop because children under 4 years and zero days weren’t allowed to begin learning numbers (or those stations weren’t available to him). You see, it’s still cohort based learning, where cohort is based on age not ability.
So he knew numbers from home, but believed at school he was incapable. It was a strange sort of cognitive dissonance where he could only “count to twenty” as reinforced by his classmates, because he wasn’t old enough to do the number station. And yet, he didn’t realize that meant he wasn’t able to say the numbers greater than 20 - but often times he’d go from 1-200, etc.
Math wasn’t the only topic where this happened unfortunately.
This was at one of the few fully certified Montessori programs in San Diego.
I believe that it was a better program than a median program, but I’m not sure if it’s because his peers came from families who could afford to spend time with their children, or if the program itself was better than median.
However, it’s a different model that definitely did not address my root concern - assisting a child to advance at their own pace (faster or slower). Which just means that my expectations were mismanaged.
Overall, I think the forest kindergarten concept is more rewarding for my kid, and he’s at least happy going to and coming home from school. That’s an oft overlooked part of schooling: ensuring your child isn’t miserable - and there’s quite a bit of misery at Montessori, due to the focus on quiet, individual work.