Just a moment ago I was replying to one of my online military homeschooling friends. She’s on the lookout for the Navy recruiting manual, or whatever it’s called, so I can add it to my growing collection of military regulations. Each service has its own vocabulary and so doing online searches for simple information is complicated unless you ‘speak the language.’ ‘Navy’ is an especially arcane tongue.

In the discussion the lady (whose husband is a recruiter; that’s how we got talking) told her husband that I already had some of the regulations. His reply? "They’re probably outdated. We just got new ones." And you know what? He’s right. Military regulations are constantly under revision to adjust to current needs. I agree with him, and told her that this is one of the concepts I’m having difficulty getting across: the needs of the services are paramount. Those needs are reflected in the regulations.

Just because something is ‘written into law’ doesn’t mean that, as in the case of homeschoolers enlisting in the military services, that ‘from now on in, homeschoolers are protected.’

A long time ago, in another galaxy, one of the chores given to those of us young enlisted members who weren’t yet proficient at anything truly useful was to post changes to regulations. We also swept things, raked things, mowed things, and painted things. If the job was boring and repetitive, we did it, or, in Army-speak, If it moves, salute it. If it doesn’t move, pick it up. If you can’t pick it up, paint it.

For posting changes to regulations, we sat down with the regulation in its loose-leaf three-ring binder, paged through it until we found the relevant page, took out the old page, and put in the new page. It’s tough enough for the people who work with the regulations to stay on top of things, without making sure that civilians, who usually don’t have an immediate ‘need to know’ are also kept up to date because the regulations are always changing.

• AR 601-210 You only have to look at the 2nd page of the regulation, which is titled "Summary of Change"

As has been noticed by others, the only thing that doesn’t change is the fact that things change.

So, with this proposed legislation that is supposed to fix the problems of the 0.5% of military recruits who were homeschooled, there is no guarantee, indeed, that the fix will be permanent. As stated in Supreme Court Cases such as Orloff v. Willoughby (popup warning) regarding compulsory service, and referred to in Goldman v. Weinberger concerning military service in general, "the very essence of … service is the subordination of the desires and interests of the individual to the needs of the service."

Another thought before I forget about it. Since the proposed changes in Section 522 will affect enlistment law, and make homeschoolers the sole group with a signed excuse from having a diploma, how soon do you think it will be before this change is challenged in court by people required to have diplomas, a court who has already upheld the subordination of the needs of the individual to the needs of the services? Not only might we have DoD defining homeschooling, but the Supreme Court as well.

Cheers!

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This entry was posted on December 7, 2005 at 10:17 am and is filed under News-Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.