Plovett,
Point two suggests their is a kind of personal tone to it. If you thought this you were right. I am not ashamed to say it.
I learnt to fly with a well known small but very professional school that attracted well known and very senior pilots on the airfield. The school sold out and I thought that after achieving my PPL there it was time to move to a bigger and better establishment. Well what can I say , wrong move.
The small school sold out to professional operators and to this day continue to provide good service.
My move took me through not to say the least, harasment from senior instructors for not meeting their standards, I mean harasment in every sense of the word.Oh yeah standards that varied from one instructor to another. Even the DCFI and CFI disagreed on topics. I also witnessed many a hungover instructor who I had seen drinking excessively the night before, sit in the circuit with a student all morning.
I have compared instructional content within a number of organisations and beleive that for my money I could of received more than some crap scribbled out the night before from Trevor Thom CIR theory book. Actually the theory instructor had not been current for years and new nothing about GPS NPS.
I believe clubs do not spend enough time on research and development and as such produce poor instructors. My wife is a teacher and the content of some of her books on learning would leave the old Principle and methods scribble that gets written up for dead.
Clubs are great for when you have a licence and want to meet people and go for a fly. I believe that just because a club is a club standards should not lower and testing should be done out of house.