A bunch of past topics made me wonder how the country/region/city or even parents of the posters here had treated swimming lessons for school aged kids.
We often hear posters say that no kid in Australia can grow up without having swimming lessons, but is it school mandatory or just the parents?
What about those that don't learn in the rest of the world, lack of infrastructure?
I had never heard of schools (middle/high or college) having their own pool until coming across an American TV show for example.
For me in France I've had compulsory swimming classes from my first grade to the end of middle school. That's 9 years. I think I even had some in kindergarden (from the school). At least the first few years we would get a diploma stating that we had a grade 1/2/... proficiency in swimming. It was a valid and asked as a proof when you enrolled in things like summer camp.
And since they could mix people in different classes (but same grade) in high school we had more choice and could take or not the programme with swimming in it (we had to choose between say program A (soccer, track, tennis) B (climbing, orientation, swimming) and so on.
So from my experience you couldn't really go through school without having to learn, but that might not be the case when there's no infrastructure around or with budget cuts. We took the school bus to go to the swimming pool, I think it's the only cost to the school when they can't walk to it.
I've also had at least two unit on rescuing someone (well, a least a plastic dummy) when I was 9 and again at 12. We had to dive with our clothes on, get the dummy at the bottom and get it back to the side of the pool. At 12 it was also done with a classmate.
As for my family we went often to the pool as kids during summer, we didn't have one but knew friends who had.
I don't think I've even seen my dad in a pool those past 20 years, but I'm pretty sure he knows how to swim, but he says the water is too wet for his liking

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And my mom would benefit from swimming lessons again, she unlearned a lot, but has a drowning experience to get over to feel safe putting her head under water.
She propably was my first 'teacher' and introduced me to the pool/swimming so I would probably have learned regardless of school.