While I was also taught that using "he" as a gender neutral pronoun was good english, it looks like that has fallen out of favor.

Seems to be an artifact of older formally trained english teachers.

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30455/is-using-he...

Using "he" has fallen out of fashion.

Call me a purist though, but I still detest using "they". It doesn't seem right.