Yes, but there's a difference between being watching a minstrel show and engaging it solely as a form of entertainment and being taught about minstrel shows and discussing them in an academic/critical way. Hence the distinction between books available for free reading in a library for the youngest readers and books that are a part of a literature curriculum.

I absolutely encourage using fiction as a means of opening discussion about history, both larger history and artistic history. I think it's a brilliant way to get people interested in the past. My own engagement with ideas that I've incorporated in my life due to their environmental benefits initially came, ironically, from the Little House books.

But when encountering these harmful aspects of the past, like undiluted racism or sexism, young kids need and deserve adult guidance that they're not necessarily going to get when reading a book that they simply pulled off of the shelf of the school library.