Myself and others were threatening to derail the Non-projectile Team Sports thread, so I’ll answer Monty’s question here:
Sort of. Surprisingly, it’s a quasi-political issue. The standard way to teach orienteering was to start out with an emphasis on compass work. Following bearings. However, all the best orienteers don’t use the compass much because it is too slow, and tend to rely on terrain reading as much as possible. For that reason, in competitive orienteering the focus in coaching, (even for newbies) is on terrain reading, right from the outset.
I suspect the emphasis in the armed forces and scouts is still on how to slowly make your way with compass bearings, which is perhaps a more failsafe technique that will still work with a poor map or in featureless terrain (conditions not present in competitive orienteering).
At least when I last heard, (and I’ve been out of the sport for a good while) one of the beefs of those who taught competitive orienteers was that many newbies (who often did come from scouting/armed forces backgrounds) were far too focussed on ploddingly slow bearings, and thought they knew how to orienteer because they could take one. Indeed, strangely enough, even many traditionalist orienteering coaches would teach about taking compass bearings first up, before moving on to faster techniques that would actually be used, most of the time. Kind of like teaching a tennis player how to do a desperation dive volley before teaching them forehand.