From an exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago entitled:

". . . During the 19th century, an approach to parks evolved that was suited to the practical conditions and social goals of the United States. "Three stages of park design can be distinguished in the course of the years from 1815 to 1915: (a) The park embellished the city as a special feature, (b) the park fulfilled the city as its, necessary counterpart, (c) the park guided the growing city as an arm of regional planning.

An American way of urban life worthy of respect required the park to complement the small home and the office tower. One of them without the other was a phenomenon, a curiosity but as a trio these developments spoke for a central sector of city life. Some severe problems of cities today are closely related to the decay of this three sided achievement and the failure to develop it after a healthy start, to extend it to more citizens. If this claim seems to offer too simple an explanation of complex evils, it is because a great vision has been forgotten, the vision of the park as the fulfillment of the city."

From China, by Felix Greene

Letter to a Friend, a child psychologist in California. June 18th

Dear lsabel,

Hardly a day goes by without my wishing you were here so we could talk. There's so much going on ­­this country is in full creative ferment, but much of it remains a puzzle to me. The outside stuff is reasonably easy to follow­­the material progress since I was here before: the schools, the new hospitals (hundreds of them), factories, kindergartens. Vitality and confidence in the future are apparent everywhere ­­you should just see the young gals stepping, down the street with pigtails swinging, as if the wide world belonged to them and the kindness they show to each other and to strangers! That's fine; one can make some sense of all this. But what goes on inside ­­especially what goes on inside children? It's just here I am most baffled…..

I have spent a lot if time watching children playing in the streets ­ little tots all on their own. They arc endlessly inventive in their games ­ a piece of wood or a bit of string will keep them happy for hours. They never fight! Why don't they? They never snatch ­­ never "that's mine.'' They seem to have almost no personal achievement motive, no combativeness; another child coming along will immediately be included in the group (no exclusive "gang feeling"); and no apparent anxiety about absence of adults. They not only never fight but they never cry, The only child I have heard crying was one, who was physically hurt. What's going on?

Some of this can be explained by the almost total permissiveness in the handling of children. I saw a small boy piddle in the middle of a big shop. He didn't mind; his mother didn't mind; other people didn't mind; the shop attendant who came to mop up smiled as if it were his pleasure to mop up little boys messes. I have seen a child squat outside a shop front, and the shopkeeper came out with brush and pan and stood courteously waiting till the boy had finished. A small child can do no wrong, and is surrounded by people who look after him. If he is traveling alone in a bus, an adult gives him a seat. To him al1 adults are "uncles and aunts'' and so the need for the presence of his own parents seems less important. His assurance comes front the adult world in general, not his own parents in particular. All this must have a very profound effect on a child and his feelings about himself.

But that's too simple and too pat. Because from the point of view of western psychiatry these Chinese children are too good. It seems as if total permissiveness leads to total docility - and a docility that continues into adulthood. I have never known a people who all think so much alike ­­ and they really do, it isn't put on for reasons of political security. I am quite convinced that if there was an absolutely free vote in this country, an overwhelming majority ­­ way up in the 90 per cent bracket ­­ would vote the same way. It is a monolithic structure, not based or external coercions but on what is much more powerful­­ a psychological unity. This in the end may have its profound weaknesses too.

I have tried to make some cross­checks about children in the kindergartens and hospitals ­ places where young children would be away from home. Bed-wetting? Very rare. Only in three and four-year-olds. At the big nursery I visited today, the teacher could recall only one instance of persistent bed-wetting at the six-year level -- and this turned out to be a girl with a physical bladder ailment. Homesickness? A little at first. Easily handled. Crying at night? No known cases. Temper tantrums? Lying on the back, kicking the heels, screaming? They look a at one another in amazement. No they have not had any problems 1ike that: Fights? very rare, Their idea of genuinely naughty behavior seemed to be for one child to push another. At the kindergarten I visited and in several nursery schools, I have asked, Do they own anything of their own? A doll? A toy? And the answer is no. If the child brings something from home, it is put in with all the other toys.

Here they have a great many toys that belong to all of them, was what the teacher at the kindergarten told me. They don't want anything of their own.

But don't they? If they do, and are angry about having to give up their own particular toy, where does the anger go? Where is the aggression going? What's happening to the normal childhood hatreds? I haven't the faintest idea, and I can find no clue. The collective, national aggression finds outlet through hatred of an externalized enemy, America; but this cannot be an adequate channel for individual frustration among the young.

Here are some other facts to throw into the melting pot: young children take on responsibility very early. You see a child of four caring for a baby of one -- feeding it, playing with. it, keeping it warm, carrying the baby for blocks, staggering under the weight. Also helping with family chores, cutting up vegetables ­­ really tiny children.

Adult docility. I went to Peking's only prison a few days ago, having been interested in penal reform in England, and here I found the Chinese doing what we have been trying to get the English authorities to do for years without success. Mainly, of course, to get the stigma, the moral stigma, out of imprisonment. Peking has a total prison population of 1800 ­-an incredibly low figure in a municipal area of seven and a half million. Forty per cent of these are political cases, but all mixed up, no segregation. The "security" is minimal. There is one guard at the gate with a rifle (the gates are open) and there is one guard in a tower. No one else is armed. The walls are low. No locks anywhere. The window bars have been replaced by large casement windows. In one workshop of about fifty prisoners I asked where the guard was and was introduced to a smiling youngster in a T shirt who was showing a prisoner how to fix a machine -- he was the only warden in this room. If these were American prisoners they would all be out of that place inside three minutes. Why don't they escape? (Very occasionally a prisoner walks out­­ one every two years or so, they are ready to take that risk, for the benefits that an "open" prison confer.) Here is docility taken to an extreme, They have. great re­education sessions­­ reform through education is the slogan.

Now to my point...Can it be that the Chinese child, having had a total sense of belonging when young, has a permanent, built­in dread of being outside, of not belonging? A Chinese child, unlike ours, has never had to learn to be on his own, resisting opinion around him, has never learned to stand on his own rock. So that the worst possible psychological pain to a Chinese adult might be to be socially outcast. Is this at the back of their re­education process? Is it the permissiveness, the total security for the Chinese child, that makes possible; the monolithic quality of their social structure? In other words, that dissent becomes almost a psychological impossibility?

Or is the structure for the unconscious itself different? After all, the Chinese developed their society for four thousand years uninfluenced by western concepts and behavior patterns. It is possible that the highly separate, individuated consciousness which some of our psychological historians believe developed in western man only at the time of the Renaissance had never had to evolve here? In other words, that the consciousness of I being separate from you is not so sharp here as it is with us? We and not­me tend to merge in the collective we?

If we are to understand the Chinese we simply cannot go on taking for granted some of our own psychological assumptions. I stand here baffled at behavior which seems to turn some of our neat conclusions upside down ­­ behavior which cannot adequately be explained by any of our accepted theories....