Tigerle, I am curious to know your firsthand experience of Montessori? Our experience across four classrooms at two schools (and I have observed at several others) differs from yours.
One of the core tenets of the Montessori method is the mixed age classroom. There is no such thing as a "curriculum for 2 yo". The kids from about 2.5 up to K age should be in a classroom together, the younger kids learning from watching the older ones. If there is no age mixing, it has very little to do with Montessori, even if they do use the materials.
Of course Montessori has curriculum, though it is matrixed and spiral rather than linear. Works are not just randomly placed in classrooms.
Typical Montessori age divisions are Toddler (18m - 3yo), Children's House (3 - 6yo), Lower Elementary (6 - 9yo / G1-3), and so on. Many states have rules that differ for children under 2.9 or 3. In our state 2.9 is the minimum age for pre-school and any child younger than that is governed by strict EEC daycare rules. Thus they are usually placed in separate classrooms from the 3 - 6 yos. There is also a developmental gulf between even the brightest 2.5 yo and 6 yos.
It is true that montessori does not usually bother with identifying giftedness, simply because the idea is that all kids are working at their own pace anyway, though they do tend to run into problems with the speed gifted kids work through concepts and appear to "skip" developmental stages, and if a kid is ready for the 6-9 age classroom stuff even though they're still four, there is not much they can do except lug around materials for a while and when that makes no sense any more, let the kid skip, just like regular schools.
It’s not clear exactly what you mean by “identifying giftedness”. I would push back on this, and say that - certainly at younger ages - Montessori naturally accommodates at least moderate giftedness. Comparing notes with families whose children attend typical schools, their gifted children typically have far more frustrations in the classroom than children in the Montessori schools. Any school system, including those focused on the gifted, is challenged to accommodate a PG child - PG children don't come along that often. Our experience over three years in Montessori has already embraced the full range of acceleration: skipping topics already mastered; accelerated pace through materials, compaction as chosen by the child; enrichment in the classroom both by broadening/deepening and by bringing in more advanced works; subject acceleration. This has worked well, especially because of the spiral that is built into much of the mixed age curriculum: DS has been able to access similar topics at a much deeper level than age mates. This is unremarkable and completely accepted because there is a natural spread in depth and grasp of concepts between typical students of differing ages. In a year or so we may do a radical grade skip with the full support of our school. I cannot imagine any other school system that could have worked more constructively with our highly asynchronous DYS. … But I can imagine some teachers who would be less supportive.
Montessori is in many ways the most rigid and inflexible method around - the prepared environment, the one and only way to use materials, the sequence of works - for the method to work for gifted kids, you need the built In flexibility of the mixed age classroom and the individual pacing. The constraints of the age based classroom destroy most advantages the method might have had.
A well-prepared environment is freeing for children - they are able to navigate and determine their own works, and set their own pace through the works. Materials tend to be self-correcting, and their use is only as rigid as the teacher who acts as guide. Some teachers do encourage extensions and combinations of materials, and children will invent their own. For example DS loves the dice roll game, which is primarily used for learning basic addition. He tries to roll prime numbers and observes their frequency.
My youngest child is in a classroom with a fairly tight age range from 2.2 - 3.2 (this is a new school: the toddler program is rolling up to a 3 - 6 program). They have a range of works in the classroom, which are updated weekly. Their teachers are very thoughtful about which works to put out, informed by the children’s exhibited interests and levels of mastery. While a program with a tight age range does have limitations - for the three year olds this is primarily to do with the lack of older exemplars - the works do not have to be tightly constrained, and children are not prevented from doing works that are either simpler or more challenging.
