Sure...when you pay for good schools with small class sizes you get better education. The point is that this doesn't work for 99% of children who are going to be in classes of 25-35 kids, and I wouldn't count the child of a smart HN reader as representative of the average "Montessori" kid.
My daughter's Montessori school had similar class sizes, 25-30. The kids were loosely grouped by age with ~4 years range in the same room. She was not uniquely successful, though I will acknowledge any private school will tend to be self-selected.
And you still missed that we had multi-age schoolhouses for generations that were successful.
If you want to argue for smaller classroom sizes, I'm on board, but you won't get a single vote from me for school funding until you're ready to completely upend the Prussian model. It converted our public schools into literal prisons for children and is a scourge on this Earth.
Class sizes in traditional schools were not always small. However, large classes would be taught differently, usually based on the students memorizing their daily "lessons" and chanting them out word-for-word. These "direct instruction" methods have only fallen out of use relatively recently as teachers sometimes felt them to be somehow demeaning, compared to more formal or intuition-driven teaching practices.
