About

What Color Is English, Math, Science, History? or the School Binder Colors Debate refers to an online debate about which color binder or folder should be used for a given school subject. For example, some say English is red while others say English is blue. The debate has been happening online since as early as 2013, peaking in popularity a number of times, including in August and September 2022.

Origin

On August 15th, 2013, Tumblr^[1] user netlfix posted, "does anyone else feel like school subjects have their own specific colour?" The post received numerous replies debating what color certain school subjects are, garnering over 222,000 notes in nine years (shown below). This is the earliest known example of the debate.

Spread

The debate spread over the following years. On August 15th, 2015, BuzzFeed^[2] published an article titled, "Raise Your Hand If You Color Coded Your School Supplies," collecting tweets and posts debating it. In 2016, The Odyssey^[3] published an article on the debate and a user on Quora^[4] made a post asking people what colors they associate with school subjects. On September 16th, 2020, The Johnsonian^[5] published a piece on the debate including the results of a poll of 241 people claiming 63% of people think English is blue and 68% said language arts is yellow. In September 2021, Color Meanings^[6] published an article about the subject.

On August 15th, 2022, Twitter^[7] user @jackiantonovich posted claiming her family was in the debate asking for opinions, garnering over 10,500 likes and 11,000 quote-tweets in a month (shown below). On August 16th, MemeBase^[8] published a collection of tweets arguing the debate.

On September 5th, Twitter^[9] user @krthers posted, "'math is-' ITS BLUE. MATH IS BLUE. NO OTHER COLOR BUT BLUE," garnering over 84,000 likes and 10,000 retweets in a day (shown below). On September 6th, the Slim Jim Twitter^[10] account posted their opinion on the debate.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References