Opinion: Swim, UNC, swim

We learn some things just to survive. We learn other things for more transcendental knowledge.

For all these reasons, we learn to swim.

Many of our readers know how to swim. But percentages of Americans who reported limited swimming ability decreased with college education. Even among college graduates, 11 percent of men and 36 percent of women reported limited swimming ability. Non-white Americans also had higher rates of limited swimming ability than white Americans.

This data on swimming ability — and on the ethnic disparities in swimming ability — help explain why African-Americans of all ages make up a relatively large percentage, relative to their total population portion, of the almost 4,000 unintentional drowning deaths that happen each year in America.

But it does not explain why, as part of a curriculum overhaul finalized in April 2003, UNC dropped its swim test as a requirement to graduate.

The committee admitted the life-saving value of teaching swimming but argued that “an equally strong case can also be made for education in other safety areas, such as motor vehicle safety.” UNC doesn’t require its students to learn to drive, the committee implicitly argued, so why should it make them learn to swim?

We acknowledge the committee’s logic, but they displayed an unfairly limited view of the importance of swimming. It’s likely humans have been swimming since time immemorial.

Egyptian hieroglyphs, a 9th century B.C. Assyrian bas-relief, and a Warring States Period Chinese bronze all show swimmers. The ancient Greeks painted Amazons swimming for leisure and deemed swimming a mark of education.

To this day, swimming and water have inspired art and philosophy.

As Charles Sprawson noted, English people who went to colonial India for personal reasons saw swimming as “a means of self-discovery and fulfillment.”

Damon Young, in his 2014 book “How to Think About Exercise,” argued that swimming is an activity especially conducive to brushes with the transcendental. The water, he wrote, lets one “savour the sublime: a joyful fear, which suggests danger alongside security.”

These last few days of summer are a good time to call for a renewed focus on teaching swimming — whether this involves a UNC general education swim test requirement or not. Expanding the joys and practical benefits of swimming is a worthwhile endeavor for all, and one that benefits the most socially disadvantaged demographics more than anyone.