objective of inclusiveness, that is, integration of learners with disabilities in mainstream schools has imposed upon schools and teachers the need to adapt to learners with divergent abilities and needs. The Supreme Court of Canada has thus defined nondiscrimination with regard to persons with disabilities: Exclusion from the mainstream of society results from the construction of a society based solely on ‘mainstream’ attributes to which disabled persons with never be able to gain access. Whether it is the impossibility of success at a written test for a blind person, or the need for a ramp access to a library, the discrimination does not lie in the attribution of untrue characteristics to the disabled individual. The blind person cannot see and the person in a wheelchair needs a ramp. Rather, it is the failure to make reasonable accommodation, to fine-tune society so that its structures and assumptions do not result in the relegation and banishment of disabled persons from participation, which results in discrimination against them. The discrimination inquiry which uses ‘the attribution of stereotypical characteristics’ reasoning as commonly understood is simply inappropriate here. It may be seen rather as a case of reverse stereotyping which, by not allowing for the condition of a disabled individual, ignores his or her disability and forces the individual to sink or swim within the mainstream environment. It is recognition of the actual characteristics, and reasonable accommodation of these characteristics 32 Right to Education Primers No. 3 which is the central purpose of [nondiscrimination]. 35 The principle of non-discrimination has been interpreted to necessitate a comparison between learners with and without disabilities in order to detect and inhibit less favourable treatment of learners with disabilities. A distinction between meeting their special needs and a positive obligation to treat them more favourably has been analyzed by the Federal Court of Australia. The Court has found that accommodation of special needs sometimes requires positive action to be taken, but has not accepted the reasoning of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, whose decision it has faulted. The Commission claimed that the yardstick should be the effort made by the school, or the lack thereof, to meet the needs of a specific learner. The Commission laid down as the yardstick ‘what the school ideally ought to have done.’ The Federal Court has adopted a lower criterion, explaining that non-discrimination required a comparison between the treatment of the learner with disabilities with that of a learner without disabilities in the same circumstances,36 and thus laying down a relative rather than an absolute yardstick. The European Commission on Human Rights has held that the right to education ‘does not require the admission of a severely handicapped child to an ordinary school, with the expense of 35 Supreme Court of Canada – Eaton v. Brant County Board of Education, [1997] 1 S.C.R., 241, para. 67. 36 Federal Court of Australia – A school v Human Rights & Equal Opportunity Commission & Anor [1998] 1437 FCA, 11 November 1998.