Judd
If the sky god instructors of the 1950's were so great you would think that their superiorly taught students that were good enough to solo in 8 to 10 hrs would not have crashed at rate 4 times higher than today.
My perception of the The subtext of your comment was yet another tiresome iteration of the old "yesterdays instructors were so much better then today's instructors" mantra.
It bothers me because it shuts down any objective conversation around looking at what was good and not so good with instructional techniques back in the day and compare that to today's instruction with the aim of combining the best parts of both. A simplistic example is applying Treat and Error Management concepts to an issue but also keeping the ball in the middle.
For what it is worth after almost 30 years of instructing I found that my students time to solo increased but the time to complete the PPL decreased and the flight test scores were much higher.
This is because I came to understand the importance of properly teaching the foundation flying skills before the student started into the circuit as well as wanting to make sure that no matter what happened on that first solo the student was well prepared.