Why School Busses Are Yellow & Black

A lot of thought went into the school bus in North America.  A lot of time and money. Thankfully, taxpayers did not pay for it – the Rockefeller Foundation did.  And then, U.S. citizens were forced to pay taxes for public education. So, I guess in the end the taxpayer paid for it. Oh, what a vicious circle. The yellow was especially concocted for use on school buses in North America in 1939. And it took some heavyweights to find just the right yellow.  In April of 1939, Dr. Frank W. Cyr, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York curated a conference designed to establish national school-bus standards for the U.S. Among these standards would be the color of yellow for the school bus. According to Wikipedia, “The color was selected because black lettering on that hue was easiest to see in the semi-darkness of early morning.”

For seven days experts from Dupont participated in the conference which was funded via a $5,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. The guise of the conference was school bus safety. Obviously the goal was not student comfort, as anybody who has ridden the prison-like school bus system in the United States can attest to.

Why in the world was the conference so obsessed with getting that yellow just right? Was it the pursuit of the most bee-like yellow that captured the thoughts of the scientists and experts?

You see, today as students ride from home-to-school or vice versa, they still ride in the yellow & black school bus. Is there any symbolism in the colors? I think there very well could be. After all, yellow & black are the colors of the worker bee.

In the public education system, rote learning is the standard. Students sit facing forward in their desk preparing for standardized testing. They are not encouraged to ask questions, question authority and follow their own heart’s desires. Instead, a well-disciplined student body behaves  like the hive. The black & yellow school bus represents that which they are preparing for: their lives as behaved worker bees.