Thomas ‘Happy’ Hobson via Wikimedia Commons

Automobile manufacturer Henry Ford once promised his customers: ‘You can have any colour you like as long as it’s black’. He sounds like he would be a bundle of laughs to visit. There’d be a voice from the kitchen: ‘If I had eggs, I could make you eggs and ham, if I had ham…’

Maybe Ford was as miserable as the man pictured on this page – Thomas Hobson. Hobson was a livery stable owner, and he owned at least 40 horses. Anyone wanting to hire a horse had to take the one in the stall nearest to the stable door, or none at all. It was ‘take that horse or you can walk’. It was literally Hobson’s choice, and it was probably the only fun he ever had. He must have been very rich though, because he had his portrait painted. That usually cost an arm and a leg. Or two arms, as Venus de Milo once found out.

Hobson isn’t looking happy at all in the picture, because unlike a selfie, which takes a second to capture, a portrait painter required you to sit without moving for at least a month, and maybe also a long weekend, with no chance to visit the little boy’s room (surely this can’t be true – Editor). No wonder Hobson was mean to his customers. I’m not sure what Ford’s excuse would have been.

But what if there had been several choices? What if there were hundreds of choices? What if there were so many choices that the customer was left totally bewildered, and couldn’t ever decide? Restaurants are like this, says caustic chef Gordon ‘expletive’ Ramsay. If a restaurant has too many choices on its menu, he says, don’t eat there. The food can’t be that good. Alternatively, a restaurant with just a few choices on the menu should be better, because the chef only has a few things to focus on. So I won’t be visiting Subway anytime soon.

In schools, teachers present all sorts of subjects to students. Often too many. I remember having to make choices when I was at school. I could choose between French, German and Latin. I had to choose between Art and Music, but I couldn’t do both. So I said screw that, and did both anyway, but I had to bunk off from other lessons because of the stupid timetable. I could only study two sciences, out of physics, biology and chemistry. The girls could only choose one. I didn’t much fancy any of them to be honest …. the subjects, not the girls.

Today, the curriculum is crammed even fuller with stuff students are forced to learn, ‘just in case’ they need it later on. What could we drop to make some space? Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth (surely not – Editor) we had something called the Trivium, which was just three subjects – grammar, logic and rhetoric. I wonder what would happen if we went back to a Hobson’s choice of curriculum, where children focused only on maths, language and science, and everything else was optional? Would this be an unmitigated disaster?

Is the curriculum too wide, or too narrow? What three subjects would you keep in your Trivium? Your views are welcomed in the comments box below. Here’s your opportunity: take it or leave it.

Next time: 10. Fibonacci’s annoying sequence

Previous posts in this series
1. Pavlov’s drooling dog
2. Chekhov’s smoking gun
3. Occam’s bloody razor
4. Schrödinger’s undead cat
5. Pandora’s closed box
6. Frankenstein’s well-meaning monster
7. Thor’s lost hammer
8. Noah’s character ark

Hobson’s multiple choice by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.