Because it's about a couple of kids, the Twain books are seen a "children's books" by most people. They can be read at that level, perhaps, but it may require more maturity for most students to understand that words have different meanings in different contexts and it is necessary to know how they were used at a given time in order to understand things written in a given time.

The meanings and emotions attending the word being removed have changed significantly, and many "kids," at the ages where academics want to "teach" them, may be unprepared to understand the changes - as they're usually "taught."

The replacement word has a much narrower meaning that has not changed significantly, and appears to me to be an attempt to restore unambiguous pejorative connotations to all references to Jim. Since you can't read the books without knowing that he's also black - and with consideration of where the change is being made - I suspect that to some degree it comes from an intent to reemphasise his (and by inference all other of his race) inferiority. That it changes the meaning of the book, and makes it even more difficult for immature students to understand the points Twain made, is immaterial to those (down South?) who take comfort in a new way to (subtly?) express their prejudices.

If the "offensive" word needs to be changed to permit it to be "taught"(?) to kids too immature to understand how the word was used, the replacement is an incredibly poor choice. It also trivializes the multiple ways in which Twain used the original word; but it would require finding different appropriate replacements specific to each usage by Twain to even suggest the multiple connotations and meaning(s) in the original. By attempting to use a single (clearly pejorative) word in all places, the bowdlerization cannot avoid emphasizing the "n...s were and always will be inferior" while pretending to be unprejudiced.

Similarly, the "Wizard of Ooze" (the movie) is a quite innocent children's tale, but the "Wizard of Oz" (the book) was a very adult, bitter, POLITICAL satire that few mature academics can fully understand simply because the "victims" it assaults are now mostly unrecognizable.

"Gulliver's Travels" is pandered about as a good story for kids, but was again political satire that almost nobody can understand. Many of those attacked were French(?) and British(?), where the politics were too complex (and mostly too trivial) for anybody to care to remember.

I knew kids in my high school who knew that "the feathers from a newly downed goose" made the best "arse wipe," but there's no way "Gargantua and Pantagruel" should be gratuitously left where other than the most precocious kids below the age of 50 can poke about in it.

At 10, the kids should be reading the collected writings of Sigmund Freud - like I did - so that by the time they're 16 or so they'll understand why Ana said "Daddy was a nut." At about 12 my son read some Camus (it was the skinniest book I had handy when he needed a book report). He got it but maybe it's part of the reason he's been "a little a'port of a straight course" since, so I'd suggest maybe it's a little advanced for most kids.

John