My eight year old....
My son could be taught to fly an A-330, and I'm sure he'd do quite well at it! A box of Doritos in front of a Playstation 2, I'm sure he could lead any nation into war with a bunch of UAVs hooked up too. That's not the point.
Cathay had a problem with gearboxes on those A-330s not long ago that nearly led to a double engine flame-out on one of their aircraft. Rolls Royce and Cathay both agreed to suspend all flights until it was sorted out. That's not all...the captain who went against company advice and diverted, rather than continue to destination was met with some disturbing news after landing. The other engine had chewed its gearbox too and was just about to fail.
What does your "Pavlovian School of Aeronautics" pilot do in similar circumstances. I know, I've seen them. They recite some stupid memo they read about in groundschool about losing an engine and the statistical chance of a second failure, and they continue on, because, that's what the bean counters want.
I was a co-pilot, not that long ago (1995) when all this bull-**** production-line pilot training started. I was flying in the right seat of a Jetstream 41 when we had a computer failure of the right engine. The engine works fine without the computer on, you just lose Automatic Performance Reserve, Auto Relight, Automatic Exceedance Protections and prop synch. This dumb ass wanted to shut the friggin' engine down. We turned off the computer and it ran fine, all with the inflight concurrence of a maintenance control that was patched through ARINC.
If this sort of crap is allowed to continue and go on the way it is, somebody is going to kill a lot of people in the process. The Americans are now only just realising this. Many regional airlines are recruiting off-the-street captains with prior experience.
Theory always gets lost in the translation to practice, it always has! Society has changed so much too. I flew with First Officers in JFK that had never had to change a spark plug in a lawn mower or wash dishes. The result was an aircraft that was deiced with water on a freezing night because no glycol had been added. It looked like a glazed donut and the FO didn't notice on the preflight.
That's why, especially now, you need experience on the flight deck, the more the better.