Back to School with Isamu Fukui
By Max Woertendyke, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 3/20/2008
At age 18, Isamu Fukui is a man with a mission; he believes that the education system in America is “fundamentally flawed.” But unlike the average high school student, Fukui is doing something about it. His first novel, Truancy, was just published by Tor Books, and the senior at Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School has also finished a prequel.
Set in a dystopian future, Truancy follows the transformation of an average teen named Tack as he is converted from a typical student into a member of the revolutionary Truancy, a militant group of students set on destroying the totalitarian education system that serves as the backbone to the City.
As a Stuyvesant alum myself, I was excited to talk to Fukui about his experiences at Stuy and to see if his time there had influenced his writing. We meet on the second floor of the building, at a row of lockers that students affectionately refer to as the “senior bar.” He arrives right on time, looking like so many of his peers: loose-fitting pants, grungy sneakers, black hair pulled back into a ponytail and the overworked appearance of someone who has spent many hours studying and attending classes. The stress of applying to Ivy League colleges as well as a number of book promotion events have surely taken their toll too.
Fukui has spent much of his life at some of the crown jewels in New York City’s educational system. Before Stuyvesant, he attended Hunter College High School, which served as the inspiration for many of the book’s more disturbing episodes. Begun as a personal writing project while still at Hunter, Fukui finished Truancy after transferring to Stuyvesant as a freshman. Although he no longer faced physical abuse from upperclassman and what he calls mental abuse from teachers, the transfer did not put an end to Fukui’s sense of dissatisfaction with school. “When I moved to Stuyvesant,” Fukui says, “even though in some respects I had a better experience, I still felt I was out of place in the system and I was still unhappy.” As if to prove the point, at this moment a faculty member interrupts to inform us that we have to clear out. “Yeah, I get that a lot,” Fukui says with a sigh.
 Isamu Fukui |
We take our conversation to the benches outside Stuy overlooking the Hudson River. Gazing out at the New Jersey skyline, Fukui talks a bit more about what he finds so reprehensible about the public school system. “Compulsory education should be ended,” he states with conviction. “If the government maintains a monopoly over education, it’s highly at risk of becoming a tool of control rather than a source of enlightenment.” Fukui believes that newly enforced rules concerning student “safety,” such as not being able to carry phones or iPods in school, while mild, are dangerous signs of things to come. In a recent article he wrote for popsyndicate.com, Fukui points to recent examples when, in an effort to maintain security, extraneous force was employed against students who were deemed “unruly.” In his eyes, these kinds of incidents suggest that the school system “is meant to replace independent thinking and independent spirit and replace it with dependency.” To this end, Fukui supports alternative methods of education, such as homeschooling, which he says was recently the subject of an appellate court ruling in California requiring parents to obtain teaching credentials before being legally allowed to homeschool their children.
A prequel to Truancy, called Truancy Origins, which is slated for publication in March ’09, will continue to advance Fukui’s agenda regarding the state of education. Set two years before the first book begins, it focuses on the birth and founding of the Truancy, delves into the history of the City where the story takes place, and gives readers the back stories to a number of characters, some of whom died in Truancy.
The three years between the first book’s creation and the writing of the second haven’t dampened Fukui’s intense dislike of the education system, he assures me. “My personal opinions have not changed,” he says. “In fact they have become reinforced. While I have been having a more pleasant experience, I still see the same things that ticked me off back when I was writing the first book. Truancy was originally born from the notes I was jotting down about things that were bugging me in school, and I’ve continued to keep those notes.”
