Children's books are not a vital record of historical prejudice.

I don't agree with these changes, but this argument makes no sense.

Ask a few random people on the street in a major US city how many books they've read in the past five years.

I'd wager that children's books represent a much larger percentage of the books the typical US citizen reads in their entire lifetime than anyone would like to believe.

If true, this would elevate their importance enough for matters like historical accuracy to be worth considering.

I would imagine past highscool, or the last education level with mandatory book reading, book reading falls off a cliff. And ever for mandatory book reading,I guess about half of students just read some kind of notes instead of the actual book.

I'd put it at middle school. In highschool plenty of students rely on Cliff Notes or whatever the current equivalent is.

To be fair a lot of students don't bother to read books school assigns as textsx because the way schools run things actually reading, engaging, and thinking about it is a disadvantage. There are certain themes and points your teachers want you to mention in your answers and any analysis outside of that will be considered "incorrect" or given lower marks, even if they relate to the text and the theme being studied.

Academics and historians studying this will look at the original language of course. The publisher goes to great lengths to make available all the changes made and is very transparent about them. Obviously most people aren't reading children's books to their kids to teach them history though