Global processes, which determined the structural changes of society, at the same time inspired the birth of new multicultural society, distinguishing the variety of social, ethnic, political and other cultures. Constant confrontation with "otherness" demands tolerance and cultural knowledge from everyone who strives for intercultural dialogue, as in the democratic multi-cultural society different cultures should not live separately but together and with each other, they communicate in the area of a culture meeting (Saugeniene, 2000). In the context of the changed global and European dimensions of education it is pursued to educate a lettered citizen that is empowered to live on the multicultural society. The system of education is one of the main forces for the personal empowerment and especially while solving the problem of social exclusion (Perry, 2000). It raises new tasks for the education as well as highlights the importance of tolerance as value. Contemporary Lithuanian society is on the way to become a more democratic one, thus an education of new generation is stressed. The school age is the most suitable for the education of tolerance and justice as well as respect and abilities to live in the democratic society. In the system of comprehensive education the importance of tolerance development should be stressed. Striving to evaluate the shift of the development of cultural and linguistic tolerance in the country in transition raises a scientific problem that is formulated by following questions: 1. Which changes are caused by global and European dimensions in the education of cultural and linguistic tolerance? 2. Which changes of tolerance development can be indicted in the content of school programs in Lithuania as country in transition? In the paper the concept of tolerance and possibilities for it's development in the educational institutions are analyzed. The ambiguity of the tolerance is described and based on concepts of Raz (1986), Gutmann (1994) etc. The discussion on the possibility to develop the tolerance in different educational institutions concerning its ambiguity and complexity as a value is presented, following McLaughlin (1997), Buber (1995), Ozmon & Craver (1996). The role of tolerance in the multicultural society is discussed by Bergue (1992) and Ray (1991). The conducted study is aimed at identifying changes in the development of the cultural and linguistic tolerance in the context of global and European educational dimensions. Comprehensive national school programmes from two periods are selected (1989-1997 and 1998-2002). The qualitative study based on the methodology of Zydziunaite (2002) was conducted in 2004. Qualitative analysis of content is based on the systemic step performance - 1) identifying the manifest categories, while referring to the "key " words; 2) the content of categories division into subcategories; 3) identification of intersecting elements in the category/subcategory contents; 4) interpreting the content data. Results of the content analysis are presented that allows evaluating changes of tolerance development in the content of school programmes in Lithuania. The objective for the national comprehensive school is empowerment of pupils to live in the democratic multicultural society. The contemporary policy of education in Lithuania is based on the multicultural values that acknowledge the issue of ethic plural society as an assumption for the social integration.