Money, I’m guessing? No school I ever went to had a pool. And field trips to local swimming pools would be expensive if you were to do it regularly for whole classes.
Do all Australian schools have pools?
Actually I recall years ago seeing a documentary about an English (IIRC) scientist who was trying to work out how people drown. What was amazing was that he conducted his research by continually drowning himself. He would get in the deep end of the pool with weights attached to his feet, stay afloat as long as he could, then proceed to drown and helpers would dive in and drag him out.
What he discovered was that as soon as you start to struggle to stay afloat you begin to do things that make it less likely that you will stay afloat. I recall him explaining that, even though he knew that raising his arms would cause him to sink, at some point his arms just reached up for some imaginary object to cling to and it was all downhill from there.
In my high school (in the early 60s), we had swimming class every day, for 6 weeks every semester. You could not graduate if you didn’t know how to swim.
And yes, we (boys) had to swim nude.
I cannot speak for Australia but I am hard pressed to think of anywhere in the US where someone wouldn’t have access to a pool/river/lake/ocean.
Formal classes are great but again hard pressed to think any kid doesn’t have access to someone who can teach the basics and get them comfortable in the water.
No need to make them Olympic swimmers. Just get them used to the water so they are less likely to lose their shit and panic.
It’s weird.
We assume someone drowning flails about and yells alot.
That is not the case at all. People drown in easy sight of people all the time. Panicking does weird things and drowning people are not near as obvious as one would suppose.
This article has been circulating around Facebook and some parenting boards a lot lately. It’s excellent:
I think the Australian swimming classes were actually preventing me from learning how to swim. It just seemed to happen spontaneously in the few years between me no longer going to the classes and the next time I tried swimming.
I was maybe 6 or 7 when my mom signed my sister and I up for swimming lessons at a community pool. I could swim a little already, and by the end of the lessons I swam like a fish.
It only occasionally occurs to me that there are people that can’t swim. I grew up primarily in Florida, and can’t remember meeting anyone in my nearly 20 years in that state that couldn’t swim.
Unfortunately, sometimes things happen that not only remind me of it, but expound on the topic, like the recent tragedy in Louisiana. I didn’t realize it, but there are more non-swimmers than I thought, particularly among certain minority groups in the US.
[
](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128954676&ft=1&f=1003)
What others have posted here is very true. I teach aqua aerobics at a university, and I had this happen during my first year. The young woman had been spending a lot of time studying and not eating properly or drinking any water. One of her classmates and I saw her at the same time and the classmate headed off and got her. She didn’t even look panicked all that much, just big wide eyes and a very faint attempt to dog paddle.
I do have a little “safety briefing” on the first day of class every semester now. I have them swim, pretend to “get into trouble” and do the roll over and float thing. I also have “stop and check your buddy” moments.
I do a lot of “deep” water games and exercises, and while no one has to participate in the deep water part of class, sometimes, like that young lady, someone might find themselves overcome by a cramp, or sudden exhaustion.
As far as the folks that can’t swim, I can’t speak for that myself (I don’t know if my strokes are the most perfect, but I am very comfortable in the water), but what I see is that people who “can’t” swim can’t seem to pick up that very fluid movement from hip to foot, they have too stiff a movement from hip to foot instead, which can result in them either staying in one place, or even moving backward. And if they’re not floaters, it can make them dunk under too much, which isn’t pleasant, especially if you can’t swim.
I learned to swim as an infant … so I have trouble understanding how people can’t swim. Oddly enough, my brother and I also went to the red cross swimming lessons for about 5 summers [My parents wanted to spend some quality time in a small summer cottage on vacations on saturday mornings :dubious:
] and both of us are excellent swimmers. mrAru swam competitively in high school, but up until recently had the floatability of a brick due to muscle mass and lack of fat 
but he manages to swim just fine.
I think that if you are a swimmer trying to teach a nonswimmer, the best way to proceed would actually to be to put them into a floatation vest and simply have the person float in a swimming pool for periods of time to acclimate to wallowing around without having to actually do anything, to show them that water is nothing to be afraid of. Start small. I think it is perhaps scaring them to try and float alone. THen once they are confident that just being in water wont kill them, they can learn to move around [with floatation on] by moving arms and legs, and work their way to doing t without floatation.
That might be fine but if I am teaching someone how to swim (which I used to do…have some funny stories from that) I do not want them to rely on a flotation device.
Rather, keep them in shallow water so if they have to they can just stand up. Doesn’t always work for small kids but in either case I am there with them a foot or two away. They know if something goes wrong (which really amounts to getting water up their nose at the worst in that situation) someone is there to save them.
That way they can have some sense of safety and learn they can float/swim on their own sans floaties.
Outstanding article. At Boy Scout camp with my son last week, my son got the Lifesaving merit badge, and I got recertified as a Lifeguard. In our courses, they taught the signs of an “active drowning victim” showing the “instinctive drowning response,” which includes outstretched arms pressing down on the water laterally, little or no kick, inability to speak or wave for help, and a vertical position in the water. The courses heavily emphasized recognition of a drowning victim.
I think that the analogy given above to riding a bike is a good one. Both swimming and riding a bike can be difficult to learn, but once learned, are never forgotten and become as easy as walking.
I readily remember not being able to swim when I was younger, having almost drowned a few feet away from an adult friend of my parents who watched me flail when I was about 7 years old. It was one of the most terrifying incidents of my life.
Today, though, I’m an excellent swimmer. I was on a swim team in high school, swim for exercise today 2-3 times a week, and competed in the mile swim in a lake at my son’s camp just last week. A few years ago, I competed twice in a 1.6-mile ocean swim across Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island.
I think anybody can learn to swim with proper instruction, and it doesn’t matter whether you can float or not. (Anybody can float on their back with lungs full of air.)
Twenty-four yards, huh? Well, maybe I could… I’m mostly skinny and I don’t float easily, but if I really work at keeping my lungs filled with air (uncomfortably so, and I have to keep working at it), I can, sort of. It would work better if I were calm and not feeling any real urgency about the emergency I’d probably be in while swimming for my life.
Does no good to tell me that humans should be natural swimmers. Chickens got wings, don’t they?
Sure, you could try to tell me not to panic, sort of like telling a small child there’s nothing to be scared of - we’re just not in the best moment to be rational at the time you’re telling us that.
Count me in with the swim-like-a-rock sympathizers.
No. Few schools would have their own pools.
We just got dragged off to the local public one. But we were certainly all taught to swim.
Not true.
Myself I am near neutral buoyancy. With lungs full of air and not moving I drift to an upright position in the water with the top of my head just barely breaking the surface. I must swim to maintain a horizontal position. If I exhale I sink.
My roommate in college took 2nd place in the collegiate Mr. America (he was a body builder). He was huge, he was muscle bound, he had shockingly low fat content on his body. I saw him grab a kick board, jump in a pool and sink with it. He was fine with that…if he swam he stayed afloat but he absolutely sunk without swimming.
That said people so muscle-bound and lacking in fat, particularly in America, are pretty rare. Most (by far) people will float with doing little to nothing.
Certainly not. Plenty don’t have ready access to a pool either. My primary school didn’t have a pool. The nearest river was an hours drive away and the nearest Olympic pool a bit further. So we learnt to swim in the irrigation channels and dams. We had to go to the Olympic pool to get our certificates.
I used to think that until I met my husband - he’s not super-cut or anything, he’s just built like he’s made out of concrete or something - you throw him in a pool, and he sinks to the bottom. You put him on his back, and he sinks to the bottom. We’re planning to go to Manitou Beach, Saskatchewan someday so he can try floating there in the saline water.
I just fail to see any reason to learn that overrides the risk–especially when you have an anxiety disorder and have never managed to even float.
I fail to see why people give a shit that I don’t want to bother learning to do something that never comes up for any practical reason in real life.
They tried to teach me as a kid by intentionally putting my head underwater repeatedly. From then on, I stayed as far away from those people as I could. My fear of water is stronger today than it ever was then. At least, back then, I’d play at the pool.
Being mean to someone is never the answer to get them over a fear. Studies show all the time that being mean just reinforces the fear. Just like being mean to a depressed person gives them a stronger reason to be depressed or angry.
Let them drown. Think of it as evolution in action.
That reminds me, I really need to renew my Life Guard certification.
A lot of private schools have their own pools.
State schools sometimes have them but it is rare, my daughter’s high school has a pool, gym, 3 basketball courts, running track, football oval, soccer pitch etc but it is a sporting type school.
Our high schools from what i have read seem tobe a lot smaller than america’s so justifying a pool is difficult but we still seem to do it when we can.
Taking a “field trip” excursion to the local council pool would not entail more than a 15 minute bus trip and costs were about $50 for the term. Some parents [me] also enrol thier kids in private lessons at a cost of about $10 per week, these are held in group sessions of about 6 kids.
I think that most people in Australia would get lessons for thier kids because we live on an island! A bloody big one but still an island.