The point of hang gliding instruction is to keep you from hurting yourself launching and landing. It is about teaching the skills of launching and landing, because it is near the ground that you are most likely to hurt yourself. If you can learn those skills you have the most chance of progressing and staying in the sport.

To learn these skills you must have plenty of practice launching and landing correctly. You are teaching your brain (rewiring it) to automatically perform the functions that you won't have time to consciously perform when you are launching and landing. You'll start off being way too slow to do the right thing. You'll start off forgetting (because you don't have the mental space and time) to do what your teacher told you to do, so you'll be put in a situation where it is safe and doesn't matter so much that you are clumsy and inexperienced.

Your instructor will hold you back and make you work on what you haven't mastered. You will need to continually practice the correct procedures in order to rewire your brain to get it to automatically perform them. This is where scooter towing (low and slow) is a huge benefit. You get a lot of practice, time after time, both launch and landing. Getting the glider set to the correct angle for launch, flaring when the glider comes to trim, holding the control frame in to come into ground effect with sufficient speed, etc. It is the over and over again practice that no other method allows that makes scooter towing vastly superior as a training method.

And this is where our current instruction is so dismally lacking. You only have to look at the landing techniques exhibited by most competition pilots to understand that they (all of us) zipped through instruction without nearly enough practice landing. The pilots come in too slow, their hands are too high on the down tubes, they transition way too high, they nose their gliders in because they have the wrong technique.

Of course, scooter towing isn't a perfect instrument for teaching how to launch off a hill side, because the correct angle of the glider for launching on a hill side will be the same but now with respect to the slope as opposed to the flat ground. So there is some adjustment to be made and students benefit a lot from launching repeatedly from small hills to learn the correct procedures.

Once students can launch and land with sufficient skill, learning to set up an approach (which involves turning and therefore flying) is the next skill set that needs to be practiced. Fortunately this will also provide additional practice with launching and landing. Learning these skills is great fun because frankly launching and landing (and setting up an approach) are the most thrilling (exciting) aspects of hang gliding. Once students have experienced the thrill of getting off the ground, just a little bit, the core thrill of flying, it is these experiences that really bring the rewards and make training such an enjoyable experience. It's not like school, it's like learning to walk, and instructors should approach it that way.

You'll notice that instruction tapers off or stops altogether once students get their first couple of high flights, at least in most locations, and after that they are essentially thrown to the wolves (their fellow, more advanced, pilots). Maybe there is some mentoring going on. Or, if they are flying at Blue Sky, the coach will be there to help them transition to more flying than launching and landing.

As we think about instruction and how to improve and expand it in the future we should think about what it is we are actually teaching and what are the most effective methods of providing that instruction.