ESSAY
Parallelism or Divergence?
What made Thomas
Paine’s Common Sense travel in 1776—and why PBS’s “parallels to today’s media”
miss the break.
September 7, 2026 · On
a PBS media-literacy lesson, the closed campus, and UC admissions after the
test went dark
PBS treats Common Sense as a preview of
today’s media. The closer analogy is a break: a public square that could still
be entered by print, versus institutions that now pre-filter what may be
said—and whom they will credential.
In October 2025, PBS Education asked what
made Thomas Paine’s pamphlet “go viral” in 1776 and what that episode teaches
about “today’s media.” The piece, Mary Kate Lonergan’s What the American
Revolution Can Teach Us About Media Literacy, is a classroom lesson. Paine
sold on the order of a hundred thousand copies in months; colonists read it
aloud in taverns, reprinted it, and argued it into a political fact. George
Washington noticed “a wonderful change … in the minds of many men.” The
takeaway is familiar: ask who made the message, for what purpose, with which
techniques.
That last part is fair. Persuasion is old.
What is not fair is the word parallel.
Paine did not pass a content-moderation
queue. He did not need a dean’s risk office, a brand-safe syllabus portal, or a
holistic-review committee to decide whether independence was “viable.” Printers
pirated him. Loyalists answered him in the same cheap medium. The fight was
ugly, local, and two-sided. The winner was not appointed in advance.
That is the marketplace of ideas in the only
sense that ever mattered: contested publication plus contested reply. The
argument developed at CotoBuzz is that this market has been replaced, in the
institutions that mint credentials, by what it calls the Overton Classroom—an
ecosystem in which the bounds of sayable thought are managed before the
argument starts. The slogan on the brochure is still “academic freedom.” The
operating system is compliance, keyword risk, and outcome engineering.
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For a free society to
prosper, a marketplace of ideas is required. Coupled with vigorous debate,
the best ideas emerge victorious. That is how America became the world’s
standard and the envy of the world. That marketplace is no more. — CotoBuzz Journal, “The Market
Place of Ideas is Closed, Replaced by the Overton Classroom,” August 18, 2026 |
What actually made Common Sense travel
The 1776 event was not a “post.” It was a
physical object in a thin information economy.
–
The pamphlet was short,
plain, and priced for mechanics, not only lawyers.
–
There was no copyright net;
reprints multiplied the text faster than Paine could control it.
–
The Committees of
Correspondence and tavern reading did what a feed does now, except the nodes
were people who could be contradicted in the same room.
–
Counter-pamphlets existed.
The argument was not a branded “conversation.”
Historians still argue about the print run.
Paine’s own figure near 100,000 is the number PBS repeats; later claims of half
a million are almost certainly inflated. Smithsonian and other accounts treat
tens of thousands—and loud public reading—as the durable fact. The directional
claim survives the audit: a 47-page polemic moved a large share of a small
population in months, without a platform owner.
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Colonists didn’t just
read Common Sense; they discussed it in taverns, reprinted it in newspapers,
and let it guide their political choices. The parallels to today’s viral
trends are striking. — Mary Kate Lonergan, PBS
Education, October 14, 2025 |
PBS is right that influence can be studied.
It is wrong if it implies that a feed plus a media-literacy worksheet is the
same machine. A pamphlet you can reprint is not a feed you cannot audit. A
tavern is not a learning-management system that scores the approved phrase.
The closed classroom
A free society needs a market in which bad
arguments can lose. Universities used to advertise themselves as that market.
Many now advertise “community,” “safety,” and “holistic” judgment—words that
sound humane and function as filters.
The Overton Window once described what a
politician could say and still get elected. The Overton Classroom describes
what a student, applicant, or junior faculty member can say and still remain
inside the institution. The enforcement is rarely a mob with a torch. It is a
form, a rubric, a grant narrative, a reporting portal, a recommendation letter
that never arrives.
Texas is the current exhibit of the other
pole: statute and board policy writing the boundaries from the other
direction—race and sex ideology restricted, syllabi reviewed, “balance”
mandated. Texas Christian University, a private campus, moved to close race and
gender studies programs and cited demand; critics called it political weather.
Texas Tech and Texas A&M have been in open fights over what may be taught
about sex, race, and even whether a Plato passage survives a gender-ideology
screen. That is not a marketplace either. It is a rival classroom.
The point is not that one faction invented
control. The point is that the old default—publish, answer, let the audience
sort it—is no longer the default inside the credentialing sector. Algorithms
and compliance regimes do the sorting first. Humans then perform the debate
that remains.
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To view the
contemporary university as a classic marketplace of ideas—where professors
debate freely and truth emerges through open friction—is to mistake a highly
filtered ecosystem for an open field. Academic freedom functions less as an
absolute principle and more as a managed corporate slogan. — CotoBuzz Journal, August 18,
2026 |
What UC is measuring when it stops measuring
The second half of the divergence is not a
tweet. It is an admissions file.
The University of California is test-blind.
SAT and ACT scores are not used in admission, even if a student sends them. The
Regents discarded the common yardstick that meant the same thing in Compton and
Palo Alto. Faculty in STEM and the humanities have since petitioned to bring
testing back; a San Diego faculty report on collapsing math preparation became
a public fight; the New York Times editorial board later called the test-blind
choice a mistake. The policy is still in force.
When the common number leaves, something else
occupies the desk. UC calls it comprehensive review, local context, the
top-nine-percent Eligibility in the Local Context guarantee—a seat somewhere in
the system, not a seat at Berkeley. Those tools can find talent that a single
Saturday-morning exam would miss. They can also become a way to produce a class
whose composition the institution already wanted, while insisting the process
is individual.
School-level data now make the mismatch
visible. Admitted California and similar ledgers compare selective-campus
offers with grade-11 SBAC results. The site’s “Forgotten 50” are schools whose
high scorers apply and still get fewer flagship offers than the statewide ratio
would predict. The other tail exists too: schools that collect large piles of
offers relative to how many juniors actually exceed both English and math
standards.
One published comparison is blunt enough
without any unnamed anecdote. At Dougherty Valley High in San Ramon, hundreds
of juniors exceeded the state math standard; Berkeley’s admit rate from that
school was in the single digits. At Mission High in San Francisco, the great
majority of juniors did not meet the math standard; Berkeley’s admit rate from
that school was many times higher. That is not a morality play about the kids.
None of them set the rule. It is a description of what the university is optimizing
once it has discarded the only exam scored the same way in every zip code.
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This is not a knock
on those kids. Not one of them decided anything about who gets in. They
applied, they got in, good for them. The question isn’t whether they deserved
it. The question is what UC is measuring when it decides. — On test-blind review and
school-level offers |
Treat any single “84 offers / one top scorer”
story with care. UC publishes campus admits by high school; six campuses can
generate 84 offer-lines from far fewer unique students. “Exceeded” is a higher
bar than “met.” Grade inflation, A–G completion, and application volume all
move the totals. Check the school yourself. The pattern does not need one
perfect anecdote. After test-blind review, offers and objective proficiency no
longer have to travel together. That is the design.
Why this is divergence, not a remix of 1776
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1776 public square |
2026 credential square |
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Cheap print, rival printers |
Platform ranking plus institutional portals |
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Reply in the same medium |
Reply inside a rubric, or not at all |
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Audience decides in real time |
Committee decides, then explains “holistic” |
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No central admissions office |
Test-blind review and local-context
engineering |
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Loyalty and independence both printable |
Career, visa, grant, and brand risk pre-sort
the text |
PBS wants students to notice technique:
pathos, omission, economic motive. Good. Teach that on Paine and on a
university viewbook.
Then teach the structural fact the lesson
plan skips. Common Sense was an argument dumped into an open channel. Modern
higher education is, in large part, a sorting machine that decides which
arguments and which transcripts will be allowed to count as excellence. That is
not “trending.” It is allocation.
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A republic can survive influencers. It cannot
survive a ruling class that no longer uses the same measures it demands the
public trust, and a campus that treats dissent as a compliance event. |
The pamphlet of 1776 asked readers to use
their own heads. The Overton Classroom asks them to use the approved head, then
calls the result inclusion.
The kids who take the offer are not the
problem. The institution that will not say what it is measuring is.
Sources
Links current as of September 7, 2026. Circulation figures for
Common Sense remain contested; the sources below are cited for the claims they
actually make.
1. What the American Revolution Can Teach Us About
Media Literacy. Mary Kate Lonergan. PBS Education / Voices in Education,
October 14, 2025 (updated March 13, 2026). https://www.pbs.org/education/blogs/voices-in-education/what-the-american-revolution-can-teach-us-about-media-literacy/
2. America’s First ‘Viral’ Post Was Published on
This Day in 1776. Teddy Grant. Smithsonian Magazine, January 10, 2025. On
contested print-run claims. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/americas-first-viral-post-was-published-on-this-day-in-1776-when-thomas-paines-common-sense-sparked-a-revolution-180985802/
3. The legacy of Thomas Paine’s ‘Common Sense’ on
its 250th anniversary. NPR, January 10, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/10/nx-s1-5669445/the-legacy-of-thomas-paines-common-sense-on-its-250th-anniversary
4. The Market Place of Ideas is Closed, Replaced
by the Overton Classroom. Look at TCU. CotoBuzz Journal, August 18, 2026.
https://cotobuzz.blogspot.com/2026/08/the-overton-classroom-algorithmic.html
5. Admitted California — school-level UC and
Cal State outcomes versus what students earned; includes the Forgotten 50 and
feeder rankings. Jim Stewart. https://admittedca.com/
6. The Forgotten 50. Admitted California.
Selective-campus offers (UCLA, Berkeley, UC San Diego, Davis, Santa Barbara,
Irvine) relative to SBAC-predicted yield. Fall 2025 cycle.
https://admittedca.com/forgotten50.html
7. Admissions by source school. University of
California Information Center. Applicants, admits, and enrollees by high
school. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-us/information-center/admissions-source-school
8. Will UC Bring Back the SAT? Test-Blind Review. Oriel Admissions,
July 3, 2026. On the system remaining test-blind. https://orieladmissions.com/uc-test-blind-policy/
9. UC abruptly suspends timeline to reconsider SAT
in admissions. Teresa Watanabe. Los Angeles Times, July 13, 2026.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-07-13/uc-suspends-plan-to-reconsider-sat-in-admissions
10. New York Times calls University of California’s
‘test-blind’ admissions policy a ‘terrible’ mistake. Fox News Media report
on the Times editorial board, July 6, 2026. https://www.foxnews.com/media/new-york-times-calls-university-california-test-blind-admissions-policy-terrible-mistake
11. How UC Admissions Changed After Going Test
Blind.
Paul Gardiner / SF Education, February 19, 2025. https://sfeducation.substack.com/p/how-uc-admissions-changed-after-going
12. On Berkeley admit rates versus SBAC math at
Dougherty Valley and Mission High. San Francisco Standard opinion, August 15,
2026. https://sfstandard.com/opinion/2026/08/15/uc-berkeley-sat-test-blind-admissions-math-scores/
13. This Is No Way to Run a University. New York Times
opinion, January 12, 2026. On Texas A&M, Plato, and classroom orthodoxy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/12/opinion/plato-texas-academic-freedom.html
14. McCaa: Protect academic freedom in Texas. John McCaa. Dallas
Morning News, June 4, 2026. On Texas Tech and Texas A&M teaching limits.
https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/article/mccaa-protect-academic-freedom-texas-22286892.php
15. Texas Christian University to close race,
gender studies departments next year. Milla Surjadi. Dallas Morning News, November
24, 2025. https://www.dallasnews.com/topic/ed-lab-college-career/page/2/
16. University of Texas System adopts new teaching
limits despite faculty concerns. Higher Ed Dive, September 3, 2026.
https://www.highereddive.com/news/university-texas-teaching-restrictions-passed-board-regents/812639/
17. How Thomas Paine’s ‘Common Sense’ Helped
Inspire the American Revolution. Patrick J. Kiger. HISTORY.com.
https://www.history.com/articles/thomas-paine-common-sense-revolution
Note on method
Offer counts from six UC
campuses are campus-level lines, not unique students. A senior admitted to
UCLA, San Diego, and Davis counts as three offers. “Exceeded” on the Smarter
Balanced assessment is a higher achievement level than “met.” School-level anecdotes
should be checked against UC’s source-school tables and the California
Department of Education CAASPP files before they are treated as a single-school
proof. The argument above does not depend on any one unnamed high school
matching a precise 84-to-1 ratio.
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