The Icelandic Art of Swim Lessons
fatherly.com
fatherly.com
"They say if you want to meet a Brit, go to a pub; if you want to meet a French person, go to a cafe. And definitely here in Iceland, you go to a swimming pool, because that’s where you can meet people — morning, afternoon or evening. And I recommend that visitors try different pools, because they all have their own character and personality and you can meet different types of people. They’re clean and affordable, and it’s something that all the locals do."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/01/travel/iceland-tourism-el...
Sweden also mandates swim lessons for grade school students, though not all schools manage to live up to the requirement.
It's a shame, because it's both useful – potentially life-saving useful – and fun. When I lived in Asia I tried teaching some adults to swim, and even just floating on water is hard for most.
[1]: https://www.sportenstrategie.nl/sportonderzoek/van-a-diploma...
I did notice when I lived there that people found swimming lessons very important, to the extent that cards to congratulate children on passing their swimming test are commonly sold.
As a teenager I ended up carving our a niche among my fellow lifeguard/ swim teachers for myself teaching adult men to swim. I suspect it was their pride stopping them from taking lessons from the (far more prolific) girls, who often times were teaching their kids to swim.
When you don't send your kids to swimming lessons you potentially deprive them of fun days away with their classmates because they need that swimming diploma to be allowed to come.
Swimming lessons for kids are possible of course but they are organized via sports clubs or municipal swimming pools both of which are not free.
Now they drown more outside of school because they don’t learn to swim unless your parents have the planning, logistics interest and budget to enrol in paid lessons (or teach them yourself).
Doesn’t help that we have a lot of immigrants from places that also didn’t teach people how to swim.
https://www.lifesavingsociety.com/media/239967/2016newsrelea...
Even the fully-owned city public pools often have an entrance fee (at least based on one near me).
In many parts of the country the swimming areas are provided by lakes and rivers.
Fun fact: most hotels that have a pool will let you use it for free or a small charge even if you're not staying there; ask at the desk.
We were even banned from going to the waterpark when going to amusement parks.
It was something like "no canoes in the pond" or something, I cannot recall.
But it was enough of an excuse for the friendly insurance agent to get the quote dropped down (and by more than the actual actuarial tables would suggest I suspect).
It does seem like swimming pools in Iceland are a bit different than the U.S., being geothermally heated. That answered my first question, which was "wouldn't it be too cold to swim for most of the year?" and may also offer an explanation for why they become community hubs: a place to be outside during winter without freezing to death. Just a guess on my part; would love to visit Iceland but haven't yet.
We have plenty of community pools in the U.S. (about 309k of them, according to a quick Google search), but the vast majority are private. We had a swimming pool at my house growing up (I consider it a miracle, since we were fairly poor), but I also spent a lot of time at the community pool.
Growing up in a hot climate, our pools were never heated, geothermally or otherwise, and served mainly as a way to cool down in the 10000 degree heat. That may be partly why there are so many private ones in the U.S.: you would jump in them to cool down, then after a few minutes you'd get out and go play somewhere else until you got hot again.
Oh, the other purpose for private pools is teenage skinny dipping, which you wouldn't do in a community hub (I assume).
On the contrary. The ocean in Iceland have a surprisingly even temperature. And even if it is a cold period its a big thing to be swimming during winter in nordic countries. In addition to that, its not like you can control when you might fall in water.
>a place to be outside during winter without freezing to death.
Thats extremely hyperbolic, the avg temperature in december in Reykavik is -1.2 celsius.
Sure, it holds steady at a frigid and deadly 5-11 C, depending on the season!
https://www.seatemperature.org/europe/iceland/reykjavk.htm
> In addition to that, its not like you can control when you might fall in water.
No doubt, but there are lots of dangers that are outside your control, and many preventative skills are not compulsory. My question is why swimming in particular is considered a required skill to have, as opposed to other survival-related skills like, say, orienteering, first aid, bushcraft, krav maga, improvised appendectomies, etc. Is this because swimming is so common? Are there an unusual number of people falling into the ocean, compared to other countries with oceans?
> Thats extremely hyperbolic, the avg temperature in december in Reykavik is -1.2 celsius.
That was meant to be an exaggeration; a joke. Being wet in below freezing temperatures is certainly dangerous to your health, though you'd have a way to warm up in most cases.
Like I go to Crete in August and I cringe entering the sea coze it feels cold. When I was a kid I'd bathe in local rivers, hills area and always took me quite a bit of time to get in (water's maybe 20 Celsius?). And going to the mountains with water exiting a large underground cave (10 deg Celsius), some people would swim in it but even getting with my feet in it would numb my fingers, no way I'm dipping my balls in it .
So again, Iceland and swimming... sounds more like a joke.
The fishing industry is one of Iceland's biggest employers, having everyone able to swim is helpful in case of accidents.
I did go to the Blue and Sky Lagoon , which for me are the Disney of bathhouses. They are worth checking out at least once.
600 yards is a solid workaday distance - daunting to the inexperienced, something I crank out pretty easily after a few years.
Community pools are very much a thing all over the US as well. I imagine COVID changed them pretty dramatically but it was very much a part of my childhood, even though I had neighbors with pools. Just look at the movie The Sandlot. The community pool was a major part of the story.
https://www.marketplace.org/2021/02/15/public-pools-used-to-...
Is that true across all states?
The local public school system here has a deal with the recreation center to do swimming lessons during the school year. But that's going to be a very local thing unless a state mandates it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3f3kph/til_t...
absolutely false, and I am getting tired of the constant Iceland propaganda their tourist industry wants you to believe
> What if Americans got together, with a similar degree of concern about the public health risk that the current barriers to learning to swim present? What if we invited more of the community to use underused private pools? What if the U.S. government incentivized the construction of more public pools to serve especially underserved populations?
There is a great Marketplace podcast on this [0]:
> Draining public swimming pools to avoid integration received the official blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971. The city council in Jackson, Mississippi, had responded to desegregation demands by closing four public pools and leasing the fifth to the YMCA, which operated it for whites only.
> “Beginning in the mid-1950s northern cities generally stopped building large resort pools and let the ones already constructed fall into disrepair.” Over the next decade, millions of white Americans who once swam in public for free began to pay rather than swim for free with Black people; desegregation in the mid-fifties coincided with a surge in backyard pools and members-only swim clubs.
> ...those big public pools eventually became mixed-gender pools, unleashing even deeper-seated fears about what might happen if black men and white women went swimming together. "Whites in many cases literally beat blacks out of the water at gender-integrated pools because they would not permit black men to interact with white women at such intimate public spaces,"
So there you go; the reason we can't have nice things is because we have an abundance of racists in the US that would rather sabotage a resource for the community rather than share a space with another human being who happens to have genes for higher melanin content in their skin. If you ever wonder why we can't have nice things in the US as a society, it is often the case that there's probably a reason that's rooted in either racism or classism.
[0]: https://www.marketplace.org/2021/02/15/public-pools-used-to-...
[1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/06/09/412913702...
[2]: https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2022/12/racial-ethnic-...
Here is an AI generated summary:
In "The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together", Heather McGhee uses the metaphor of the public swimming pool to explain her thesis.
In the mid-20th century, thousands of public swimming pools were built across the United States for community enjoyment. These pools were often funded by tax dollars and were large, resort-style pools that families could enjoy. However, the vast majority of these public pools were segregated, barring people of color, specifically Black people, from access.
When the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, ending segregation, many white communities didn't respond by integrating these pools; instead, they drained the pools completely. Some went as far as filling the pool with dirt or concrete, or letting them fall into disrepair. It was a drastic measure ensuring that if they couldn't have the pool to themselves, no one could use it.
McGhee uses this metaphor as a representative example of the zero-sum game mindset, the idea that any gain for the Black community is seen as a loss for the white community. It also highlights the cost of racism: communities chose to lose a valuable public resource (the public swimming pool) rather than share it equitably.
The public swimming pool narrative is a recurrent theme in the book. It illustrates how racism harms everyone, not just those being discriminated against. It's an example of the societal and communal self-sabotage that occurs when racism drives decision-making, showing that racism doesn't just hurt the targeted group but deprives everyone of shared public resources and opportunities.