I my humble opinion, all a person needs to know to be able to fly solo is takeoff, fly smoothly and predictably and land. I saw at the beginning of this thread some know it all get critical of loop and roll practice. Flying is supposed to be fun, and in teaching anyone anything you should never set up the lesson so that the trainee will fail or stress out. Loops and rolls teach the basic extremes of using the control surfaces. I do not think that it is imperative that a trainee learn to fly inverted before soloing, if a person can roll comfortably they can play around with inverted flight 3 mistakes high all day long. I never flew rudder on my trainer and all it cost me was inaccurate landings. I could hit the runway area very safely with ailerons and elevator. AFTER I soloed the guys began challenging me to use rudder to correct heading. A new pilot by nature will not want to fly inverted until he feels comforatble in his mind doing so. He will not intentionally spin or stall his airplane. A good instructor will make sure that a new pilot knows exactly what conditions will stall his airplane and how NOT to do so. A newbie is screwed if they stall in most cases anyways and will learn how to handle AFTER they become confidant enough to solo. Just because a pilot gets his liscense in real life does not mean he has experienced a severe spin or stall. There are some guys who can takeoff and fly in circles for years without crashing but cannot or dont want to to aerobatics of any sort. Teach 4 BASIC things for practical flight training, throttle management, elevator use, rudder use and aileron use and all the aspects of their basic function, plus field etiquette and a guy will not need to know how to get out of a stall or spin with a trainer. As they become more confident and can "feel" the airplane flying they will experiment at their own pace and obviously fellow club members will be there to offer all the "help" a person could ever ask for.

The scariest people that I see fly are not trainees or newbies but experienced pilots who dont know their limitations and fly partially out of control from takeoff to landing and dont even realize it.

Dont get upset, just my perspective