No considerable
progress has made over the last year, since the day the Ministry of Education
and Training (MOET) asked general schools to teach swimming to students as a
part of the program, “Vietnamese can swim”.

The spirit is willing, but the flesh
is weak

In fact,
the bad implementation of the program on teaching swimming was foreseeable.
“Every school has at least one gym teacher, but not all of them have been
trained in the way to teach swimming to students,” said Phung Khac Binh, former
senior official of MOET. The biggest problem that has hindered the implementation
of the swimming teaching program is the lack of swimming instructors.

Parents in Hanoi all say that they
are ready to pay money, so that schools can organize swimming lessons for
students. However, according to Tien phong, it seems that no state owned school
can design swimming teaching curriculums.

Do Quang
Hop, Headmaster of the Cat Linh Primary School
in Dong Da District in Hanoi,
said that the school really wants to teach swimming to students. However, in
the current circumstances, this proves to be “impossible”.

As schools
do not have swimming pools on the schools’ campuses, they have to bring students to swimming pools in the city,
where students can learn how to swim. The swimming pool nearest to the Cat Linh
School is the one located
three kilometers far from the school. However, as the number of the students is
relatively high at 1700, it would be a complicated problem to arrange time for
swimming lessons and to meet and see off students.

According
to Bui Thi Van Anh, Head of the Cau Giay district’s Education Sub-department,
teaching swimming is really an abstract requirement. “All the schools in the
district do not have swimming pools of their own. Meanwhile, there is only one
public swimming pool to serve local residents. It is now impossible to think of
teaching swimming to primary school students,” she said.

Mai Sy
Nhat, a senior official of the Hanoi Education and Training Department, said
that schools’ teachers have experience a training course on accident and injury
prevention for students, including the swimming skills, so that they can teach
students in summer. However, teaching swimming to students has not been a
legalized compulsory task for schools due to the poor conditions of the
schools.

Lacking
swimming pools and swimming instructors is also the problem of the schools in HCM City.
Nguyen Thanh Hai, Head of the Tan Binh District’s Education Sub-department,
said that the agency can only encourage schools to teach swimming, while it is
impossible to compel them to do that.

“There are
1000 schools in HCM
City, while there are
only 20 swimming pools. The material facilities for teaching swimming remain
very poor,” he said.

Vietnamese need to know swimming

Most of
parents want their children to learn swimming in their childhood. On webtretho,
a well-known education forum in Vietnam,
“where to bring children to have swimming lessons?” is not a hot topic among
mothers. A woman, who has a three year old daughter, is also looking for the
swimming teaching centers. Meanwhile, another parent said she is happy because
of the right decision that she brought her child to swimming lessons when the
child was four years old.

Local
newspapers recently reported a lot of cases, where students died of drowning
when they were swimming on the rivers. Experts have, immediately, called on
parents to bring their children to swimming classes.

“It’s
really a pity that Vietnamese people, who live in a country with the sea, many
rivers and lakes, cannot swim and do not have necessary skills to prevent
drowning,” they say.

Source: Tien phong