School Board Member Challenges Reading List : Moorpark: Tom Baldwin says Jean Auel’s novels, including “Clan of the Cave Bear,” are unsuitable. Administrators reject his views.

A Moorpark school board member is fighting to have the works of popular novelist Jean Auel, author of “The Clan of the Cave Bear,” taken off the Moorpark High School recommended reading list because of explicit sexual content.

Calling Auel’s works inappropriate for young readers, Tom Baldwin said he has been working behind the scenes for about a year in an effort to remove the books but decided last week to go public after a committee of high school teachers and administrators rejected his appeal.

“The time has come to make parents aware that works containing hard-core graphic sexual content are on the list of books recommended for their children to read,” Baldwin said. “To keep this under wraps any longer would violate the trust of parents.”

Baldwin said he objects specifically to Auel’s “The Clan of the Cave Bear,” “The Valley of the Horses,” “The Mammoth Hunters” and “The Plains of Passage.” The books are among 175 volumes on the school’s recommended 11th-grade reading list, from which students can select books for required class reports or extra credit.

Peggy Blakelock, head of the English department at Moorpark High School, on Tuesday defended the Auel series as appropriate and valuable educational material.

“What it does is to re-create, in a more readable form, what the beginning of man must have been like,” Blakelock said. “I can think of no series that is comparable to that series in its scope.”

After Baldwin was rebuffed at the high school level, he appealed the committee’s decision directly to Frank DePasquale, the Moorpark Unified School District’s assistant superintendent for instruction, who on Friday informed the board member that he was also finding in favor of the books.

DePasquale was not available for comment Tuesday.

Baldwin is appealing DePasquale’s ruling to a district-appointed review committee. He said he expects eventually to plead his case before his colleagues on the board and plans to vote against continued recommendation of the books. The matter will probably come before the board later this month or in early December, he said.

Although Baldwin’s attacks on the books have been viewed by some as a form of censorship, he rejects that label.

“If I thought that’s what I was doing, I would stop,” he said. “I have a principle, too. I think that when you have a democracy and a school board, one of the reasons is to make sure what’s going on in the classroom reflects the feelings of the community.”

Blakelock said the books were placed on the 11th-grade list several years ago, after the state recommended “The Clan of the Cave Bear” as a core reading that could be used in ninth-grade classes.

The book was used as the basis for a movie of the same name, starring actress Daryl Hannah.

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Blakelock said other books in the series have been added to the recommended reading list as they have come out, but few students opt to report on the Auel works because of their length--usually 700 to 800 pages.

“We’re trying to offer as many books as possible for students to choose from,” Blakelock said. “And the thing to get students to read is to offer them something that they enjoy reading.”

The teacher said Auel’s works educate students on the uses of herbs by early man, the development of language and other anthropological advances that might not register with them if presented in a stuffy textbook.

But Baldwin said the works titillate more than they educate and questioned why any school or teacher would recommend students read such graphic material.

“Since excerpts from these books are too graphic to be printed in a newspaper or read out loud in a public meeting, how could the high school recommend such materials to our children?” Baldwin asked. “We shouldn’t be recommending books like this for young people to read.”