I think very few people can claim to an absolute principle against any kind of editing of books for children, since this has been happening for as long as books

I think very few people can claim to an absolute principle against any kind of editing of books for children, since this has been happening for as long as books and children existed, including in the past century -- does anybody buy a "Grimm's Fairy Tales" book expecting to find "The Jew Among Thorns" included? There is also not a free speech issue at play here other than that already imposed by the copyright system. The Dahl estate is not being forced to make these changes, and indeed nobody can compel them to authorize publishing an unaltered version of the books (under current law). But once you've set those grander questions aside, you can evaluate this specific case. Do you agree with the purpose of the edits? Do you think they're appropriate in degree and scope? I would say that I am somewhat sympathetic to the intention of some of the edits. Dahl fielded objections to his work during his lifetime, and pushed back strongly against the suggestion that his books were unsuitable for children for moral reasons [1], but he also changed (or permitted his publisher to change) the Oompa-Loompas from an African tribe to something more fantastical. These kinds of spot changes can be seen as analogous to a parent or teacher reading aloud and skimming past occasional material [2] that they don't find suitable for their audience. It's the scope and degree of the changes here that I find inappropriate. This is not a scalpel removing a small blemish, it's a complete makeover. It's replacing Dahl's world (and his worldview) with a different one. Many of the changes feel arbitrary (Matilda can't read Conrad and Kipling? But Austen and Steinbeck are fine?) and others mutilate the humor or the meaning of the work. And there's no indication that unedited [3] versions of the work will be kept in print. For those reasons I think this is a terrible decision that should be reconsidered. If schools want reading material more compatible with modern mores there are many authors writing today. Or they can work to help kids get context on where Dahl was coming from. Authors don't need to be presented as moral exemplars. [1]: https://www.hbook.com/story/charlie-chocolate-factory-reply https://www.hbook.com/story/charlie-chocolate-factory-reply [2]: I recall a schoolteacher skimming past a scene in a book where a teenage boy was drawing a picture of his girl friend -- later, reading the book, I realized there was a brief reference to him "flushing at the swelling of her breast" or something along those lines. [3]: Many books are edited with the author's permission after release, so what "unedited" means is complex (and makes some of the "you lose copyright if you bowdlerize your book" solutions I've seen to this difficult).