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When a tradition-directed person fails, he feels shame in departing from the path under the eyes of his fellows; when the inner-directed fails, he feels guilt in departing from his own principles; the other-directed, living in hope of the approval of his peers, is seldom free of a diffuse anxiety lest this approval be withheld. Riesman notes that from the walls of the inner-directed school, the ruins of Pompeii and the bust of Caesar often looked down—reminders of the past from which one learned the moral principles of history, part of the gyroscopic mechanism. These pressed stern standards upon a child —and many children were crushed. But the school for the other-directed has its own mural pressures. "The walls of the modern grade school are decorated with the paintings of the children or their montages from the class in social studies. Thus the competitive and contemporary problems of the children look down on them from walls that, like the teacher herself, are no longer impersonal. This looks progressive, looks like a salute to creativeness and individuality; but again we meet paradox. While the school de-emphasizes grades and report cards, the displays seem almost to ask the children: 'Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is fairest of us all?' "
A Piglet Paradigm. Competition in the world of the young is not all-out; in this, it imitates the adult world of business and politics in which they will move. Modern business competition turns around "marginal differentiation," i.e., competing products imitate each other, yet call attention to small differences. Increasingly, businesses group themselves in trade associations and businessmen look to their competitors, rather than to their own accounting department, for the signals that mean success. Their attitude toward their own work is not that of producers, but of consumers. Morale is bucked up when a business decision meets the approval (and imitation) of the "antagonistic cooperators" of the adult peer group.
Horatio Alger stories are now considered corny because they are irrelevant. Their function of training the young for the drive toward goals on the frontier of work has been replaced by the mass-media effort to "train the young for the frontiers of consumption—to tell the difference between Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola . . . We may mark the change by citing an old nursery rhyme:
This little pig went to market; This little pig stayed at home; This little pig had roast beef; This little pig had none; This little pig went wee-wee-wee All the way home.
"The rhyme may be taken as a paradigm of individuation and unsocialized behavior among children of an earlier era. Today, however, all little pigs go to market; none stay home; all have roast beef, if any do; and all say 'we-we.' "