Per­spec­tive changes every­thing. Or, as Shakespeare’s Ham­let put it: …there is noth­ing either good or bad but think­ing makes it so.”
Ham­let was mus­ing on being a pris­on­er, but his insight car­ries a les­son for the would-be sav­iours of chil­dren who have imposed hun­dreds of changes to the late Roald Dahl’s stories.

None of them as far as I can dis­cern, were demand­ed by chil­dren. The pub­lish­er (Puf­fin) said that it want­ed “to ensure that Roald Dahl’s won­der­ful sto­ries and char­ac­ters con­tin­ue to be enjoyed by all chil­dren today.”
The only rea­son chil­dren today might not enjoy Dahl’s sto­ries is if adults decide they have to view them from an adult perspective.
Dahl once said of crit­i­cism of his  books: “I nev­er get any protests from chil­dren. All you get are gig­gles of mirth and squirms of delight. I know what chil­dren like.”
Salman Rushdie, who knows more about falling afoul of intol­er­ant views than  almost any­one in lit­er­a­ture, called chang­ing Dahl’s prose “absurd cen­sor­ship.”
A change in “The Witch­es” is an egre­gious exam­ple. A para­graph that explains that the witch­es are bald under­neath their wigs has a new sen­tence: “There are plen­ty of oth­er rea­sons why women might wear wigs and there is cer­tain­ly noth­ing wrong with that.”
Did any­one say there is?
No. Only those whose per­spec­tive implied there might be.
That would be “Inclu­sive Minds” , whose net­work of “Inclu­sion Ambas­sadors” (a Dahl-esque title if ever there was one) “works with the children’s book world to sup­port them in authen­tic rep­re­sen­ta­tion, pri­mar­i­ly by con­nect­ing those in the indus­try with those who have lived expe­ri­ence of any or mul­ti­ple facets of diver­si­ty. “ (Their bold).
Appar­ent­ly “authen­tic  rep­re­sen­ta­tion”  requires chang­ing bio­log­i­cal­ly-gen­dered  char­ac­ters into “per­sons”.
 If we’re all “per­sons”, what and how do we teach chil­dren about sex and repro­duc­tion? Or do we let them learn it from social media? Spare them from the adults who flaunt their “exper­tise” on that.

                        DO AS I SAY…

Ash­ley Esque­da, a writer and ‘pop cul­ture expert’,  (what­ev­er that may be) tweet­ed: “It’s good to evolve with the time”, adding that she was “Very tired of peo­ple demand­ing we remain locked into their childhoods.”
A lot of us feel the same about peo­ple who keep insist­ing we have to lock our­selves, and our chil­dren, into the think­ing of who­ev­er Esq­da and her “we” may be.
The respon­si­bil­i­ty and process of guid­ing chil­dren through their for­ma­tive years is called “par­ent­ing”, which as far as I know does not have to be con­duct­ed under the man­date of the dic­tates of a self-cho­sen few.
Give me one rea­son why a par­ent should take advice from those who felt the need to decree that Mary in “The BFG” goes “still as a stat­ue” instead of “white as a sheet”.
Any­one who finds that colour ref­er­ence offen­sive might want to con­sid­er whether they have some deep-seat­ed racial ‘issues’ that need pro­fes­sion­al help.
One social media user com­ment­ing on the changes was “quite hap­py to have more inclu­sive ver­sions to read to my lit­tle one” and added. “I’ve been hor­ri­fied at the con­tent of some of the things I read as a child, hav­ing revis­it­ed them as an adult.”
But you were evi­dent­ly not “hor­ri­fied” as a child, so unless what you read then has warped your think­ing and behav­iour as an adult, what’s your point again?
If read­ing children’s sto­ries with­out ben­e­fit  of “Inclu­sion Ambas­sadors” and their ilk is harm­ful to future devel­op­ment, why should we lis­ten to adults who did not have it, but now want to impose it?

                                   DUMBING DOWN

If every­thing is dilut­ed to bland, then what is learned, nev­er mind enjoyed? Puta­tive guardians of young minds have been ban­ning or to try­ing ban  “The Adven­tures  of Huck­le­ber­ry Finn” because of how it deals with racism since a month after it was pub­lished in 1885.
My father read Mark Twain’s books to my broth­er and I before we could read them ourselves.
My most sear­ing moment of read­ing about racism was when I was 16. Our bus tak­ing 40 Cana­di­an kids to a con­ven­tion in Dal­las stopped at a café in Geor­gia. A sign over the water foun­tain read ‘Whites Only’.
The ones on the wash­room doors pro­claimed: ‘White Males’ and  ‘White Females’.
The third one was marked sim­ply ‘Coloureds’.
Rather than hav­ing been de-sen­si­tised to racism by a child­hood read­ing of “Huck­le­ber­ry Finn”, I was hor­ri­fied to come face-to-face with it a cen­tu­ry after the tale was written.
Huck’s insight in the moral cli­max of Chap­ter 31 is one those who are hell-bent on chang­ing Roald Dahl’s and oth­er children’s books would do well to heed:
“That is just the way with some peo­ple. They get down on a thing when they don’t know noth­ing about it.”

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