UN panel: US school district right to pull textbook

HARTFORD, Conn. – A group of United Nations human rights experts is praising a Connecticut school district for pulling an “offensive” textbook from classrooms because of its assertions about slavery.

The panel says school administrators elsewhere should emulate last month’s decision by the Norwalk school district to pull “The Connecticut Adventure” by John Ifkovic from fourth-grade classrooms.

The U.N. human rights office in Geneva said in a statement Thursday that the book paints an inaccurate picture by saying that slaves in Connecticut were often treated like family members, “taught to be Christian” and sometimes taught how to read and write.

Ricardo Sunga, chairman of the U.N. Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, says that depiction “is a distortion of the true nature of enslavement.”