Along these lines, in a recent interview with the First Lady of Iceland, she recommends that tourists who want to meet real Icelanders should visit a swimming pool:
"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."
In Canada we’ve been removing them. Probably because some kid drowned at school in 1990-something.
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.
Every school/school board in Canada will have liability insurance. But the premiums will vary. Budget tight and need to save a dollar? Remove swimming or limit/cut the number of students covered under it.
We were even banned from going to the waterpark when going to amusement parks.
The college I went to got a discount on their insurance for some relatively obscure activity being banned, and we only ever found out about it because someone asked why.
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).
Same when I went to school in Germany. That said, the public pool I went to feel into disrepair a few years ago and got shut down because the community couldn't fund it. I'd estimate the nearest public pool now to be 30 minutes away which probably means no swim lessons for kids now. It's interesting how that's deteriorated because my school even used to have its own pool till a few years before I attended. So the town went from at least two pools in the 70s to zero now. The area also used to have multiple seasonal, outdoor pools in the 60s and 70s all of which were gone by the 90s. Everyone got richer, but we cannot have these small communal delights anymore.
Didn't knew that. It was a municipal swimming pool indeed. But everyone I know in other places also had swimming classes IIRC. Possibly it's harder to provide it in more urban areas (small northern town here)?
It's not mandatory since 1985, and apparently the number of schools offering it has declined quite a bit to about a third in 2016[1], and I wouldn't be surprised if it was even lower today but I can't find more recent figures.
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.
It's not mandatory but as far as I know it's pretty much a given that you send your kids to swimming lessons. People that can't pay for swimming lessons for their kids can request government help to pay. Generally when kids are about five years old they'll start with "Zwemdiploma A" ("swimming diploma A"), which you often need to even be allowed to enter the deeper pools.
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.
It's also a lot easier to teach kids than adults. Besides logistical things like the ease of pulling a kid around versus an adult, by adulthood a lot of people end up being embarrassed around trying new things, especially ones that require them to be largely undressed and in a strange environment.
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.
And not just that- 10% of Dutch traffic deaths are by drowning.
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.
Yeah same in the UK although it doesn't sound like we take it as seriously. That said I think it's quite rare to find people that can't swim, even if they are very out of practise.
The only people I know that came out of UK schools unable to swim were people with a bad phobia of the water. And they weee still given individual tuition while everyone else was in the group so they’ve got some level of skill.
uk too, at least we all did. Parents tell me they had to swim in clothes for the final lesson as a precation against drowning, but we never had to do that. Fact my parents did it as well shows its been going on quite a while
Curious why swimming is considered a required skill for people to have in Iceland, and why swimming lessons until age 14 are compulsory, as the article says.
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).
Every tiny small town in Iceland has at least one amazing swimming pool. With the free geothermal energy its just part of the culture. I loved it when I visited!
>wouldn't it be too cold to swim for most of the year?
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.
> 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.
Yeah, Iceland is like the last place I'd have guessed people swarm to get swimming lessons.
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.
> Curious why swimming is considered a required skill for people to have in Iceland, and why swimming lessons until age 14 are compulsory, as the article says.
The fishing industry is one of Iceland's biggest employers, having everyone able to swim is helpful in case of accidents.
Iceland's communal swimming and hot bathing especially in the government run bathhouses were the best part of Iceland for me (traveled solo). I met locals (now friends) and scheduled & met/dates there thru dating apps.
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.
I spend a decent amount of time at my local pool. It's a good space, but not as socially developed as what's described, and has a distinct authoritarian vibe.
600 yards is a solid workaday distance - daunting to the inexperienced, something I crank out pretty easily after a few years.
The US doesn't have compulsory swim lessons for little kids, but I do remember it being a part of my high school education. (Probably only 1 or 2 kids in my gym class couldn't swim though.)
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.
The US had significantly more community pools before desegregation. Once they were required to allow all swimmers, construction of new public pools stopped and many existing pools were drained. This is the reason private pools are so popular in the US.
It depends what you mean by "compulsory" - e.g, like public school is compulsory (can't graduate), or just that everyone gets the chance to do it (required class).
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.
> 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?
US used to have a lot of public swimming pools. The problem is racism and desegregation.
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.
And more reading on the brutal history of integrated public/community pools in the US [1] with an infamous photo of a motel manager pouring muriatic acid into a pool where black and white demonstrators used a pool togther:
> ...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,"
A survey conducted by Northwestern University [2] found that there's a ~25% gap between Black and Latino children versus white children when it comes to swimming lessons.
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.
This a Book: The sum of Us - By Heather McGhee [0]
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.
Columbia famously requires a swim test from everyone but the engineering students. The legend says "Manhattan is an island. Engineers can build boats."
The Citadel used to as well. No idea if they still do but you had to tread water for a few minutes then swim the length of the pool without touching the bottom to graduate.
How prevalent is this though? I come from a small rural part of the country that voted about 98% for Trump in 2016 and 2020. I remember going to the community pool and no one doing or saying anything negative to the non-white swimmers. I won’t pretend that there is no racism, but this notion that large swaths of the country are just itching to break out the noose is rude and just plain false.
Excuse me, but I didn’t say anything like “large swaths of the country are just itching to break out the noose.” You’re being hyperbolic and oversensitive.
When I’m talking about “some corners of our country”, I’m talking about corners that I’ve personally seen myself. It’s not subtle when, e.g., the pool attendant lets me in the municipal pool without a second glance but stop the black mother behind me and pointedly demand she prove her residence.
I don't know how to measure that prevalence, in any useful sense. There are also confounding factors as the history of segregation means black parents - who didn't learn to swim - don't think it's fun to take the kids to the pool, nor can teach the kids to swim.
It's certainly not low enough that it can be ignored. There's almost certainly research papers which address your question, if you go looking for them.
The third prevalence, which thebooktocome points out, is how public pools closed down, to prevent mandatory desegregation. Instead, whites started or joined private clubs, where racial discrimination is legal.
How many private pool are in your small rural part of the country? Even without explicit racial bias, are the membership fees high enough that the strong correlation between race and income results in an implicit racial bias?
] The absence of swimming pool access in many cities throughout the nation explains why in 2009 the Philadelphia-based Creative Steps Day Camp paid the Valley Swim Club, a private facility in Huntington Valley, Pennsylvania, a $1,950 membership fee for weekly access for their campers to the club swimming pool." According to newspaper reports, when some of the approximately sixty predominately black and Hispanic day campers "got in the pool[,] all of the Caucasian children immediately exited the pool."9 Some day campers reported overhearing "club members asking why so many black children were in the pool ... [and] using racial slurs while they were swimming."
] ... The swimming pool at issue in the Valley Swim Club incident, however, was private. After Brown and the closing of government-operated pools, many whites fled to privately-run
pools.
Oh, right! and the 2007 book "Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America". I had forgotten about that one. Google Scholar has some 380 papers citing the book. The book is at https://archive.org/details/contestedwaterss0000wilt .
"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...