I know I'm opening an old can of worms, but at one time I taught people to fly on a professional basis. The old hands would/will probably jump all over me, but all of hundreds who came to me were apparently so desperate to learn, they had no problem paying me $50.00 US per hour for instruction. Not only that, most gave me a couple hundred dollars in tips once they were able to fly very confidently on their own. BTW, for various reasions, I only teach on a voluntary basis now.
One reason is that if one teaches by the hour, unlike volunteer instructors, one has a obligation to give his "customer" a satisfactory bang for his buck. Now, I can give my student 5-10- or whatever amount of minutes of stick time I feel like giving. BTW, I could never figure out why so many people who belonged to clubs would have no problem traveling hundreds of miles and spend hundreds of dollars to learn something they could allegedly receive free from their clubs and 99% came from clubs who offered "free" instruction.
I realize MAAC has a legal problem with paid instruction (AMA allows commercial instruction), but if club instructors had more incentive to teach, perhaps AMA might not have lost 40,000 members in the last few years and I'm sure MAAC's numbers could be much, much better.
Given that instructing can be very stressful, I cannot see any improvement as far as growth in the hobby/sport goes.
Due to the encrouchment of the population on open land and the fact that land owners will be offered much, much, much more money for their property than any club in the world is able to come up with...needless to say, we are in deep, deep, dog dirt. For all intents and purposes, our next generation might not have a place to fly. As they say, reality sucks.
mryehr