After almost two years of public hearings and research, Ontario’s Royal Commission on Learning has made public a four-volume report that includes 167 recommendations covering everything from computer use in the classroom to local school financing.

“We think schools can be a lot more informative and a lot tougher than they are now,” said Gerald Caplan, the one-time academic and newspaper columnist who co-chaired the five-member commission.

Its report, For the Love of Learning, is the first wide-ranging review of Ontario’s education system, which caters for two million students, since the Hall-Dennis Report 25 years ago. That report challenged tradition by recommending open-concept classrooms, less emphasis on homework and an end to province-wide testing.

That approach has come under increasing criticism across the country with parents and politicians urging a more rigorous approach to schooling and a return to basics.

One of the commission’s most controversial recommendations is to make full-time schooling available to children from the age of three, modelled in part on the French system. Currently, Ontario children begin school at the age of four but only for half-days.

“Let’s be clear,” the commission said in its four-volume report, “we’re not speaking of child care, but of a carefully structured enterprise that combines an introduction to learning, often through play, with high quality education. ”

The commission said that it is convinced early childhood education is essential to helping disadvantaged children attain their full potential. But school for three-year-olds would not be mandatory.

To help pay for expansion of early childhood education, the commission recommended the abolition of Grade 13, the fifth and final year of high school in Ontario. “No other province keeps most of its students in secondary school so long, and there is no clear advantage to doing so.”

In Canada’s federal system, education is under provincial jurisdiction. The report recommends province-wide, standardised report cards for students and an evaluation of maths and literacy skills at the end of the third grade. In addition, a “literacy guarantee” test would be required in the 11th grade.

However, the commission was leery of standardised testing and rejected the ranking of individual schools based on their level of success. “There are many variables that go into making a good school, and these comparisons invariably ignore and distort the complex reality that every school represents.”

Another major thrust of the report aims at improving the quality of teacher training by increasing the length of their specialised course to two years from one. A new College of Teachers would set professional standards and recertify teachers every five years.

The report also calls for: * Community councils in every school to give more say to parents and community representatives in the running of schools; * More money to be spent on computers and teachers to receive better computer training; * Students to do PE for 30 minutes at least three times a week.

The left-leaning New Democratic Party government, which appointed the commission and is facing a general election later this year, has embraced many of the recommendations and promised to implement them quickly.