When teaching classes related to cultural and social differences, teachers often face the problem of how to welcome and include people defined as culturally or socially “different” in the larger community without, at the same time, stigmatizing them as deviant or inferior on that basis. The notion of tolerance can be said to capture this problematic relationship between the guest and the host, the tolerating and the tolerated, those inside and those outside, by creating the very boundary beyond which the other is no longer welcome. Lately, voices have been raised against the idea of promoting tolerance in education claming that liberal as well as multicultural discourses of tolerance carry with them a certain expression of asymmetry and domination due to their binary structure (see Brown, 2006; Zizek, 2004). According to these critiques, when we tolerate others, we tend to do so from a position of hegemony within a culture, allowing the recipient of tolerance to do nothing more than exist as an invited but strange guest within the dominant cultural identity. Hence, even if tolerance as a way of being-with-others is preferable than intolerance, tolerance itself does nothing to break down or change the cultural and social norms that causes us to define ourselves and others in relation to a given conception of what it means to be human. In the present paper I will explore a way out of, or rather, in to this dilemma by examining Jacques Derrida’s suggestion that “only the one who endures the experience of being deprived of a home can offer hospitality” (2000, p. 56). I will argue that it is not the tolerating/tolerated distinction as such that is the problem with contemporary discourses of tolerance, but how we think about the boundary between us and them, self and other, inside and outside. Following Derrida, I will claim that identities and communities are always constructed in a we/they relationship, but instead of seeing this as a problem to overcome, I will suggest an approach to this relationship that is open to interruption and change. Such interruptions of one’s identity or being-at-home in the world, I will argue, are not only unavoidable but indeed valuable for advocating personal transformation and social justice in education; they do not mark the end of our concern for others, but rather it’s beginning, since they open the possibility to welcome the very otherness of the other.

Drawing on Derrida's concept of hospitality as an interruption of the self, I first elaborate on the importance of examining new ways of encountering difference in education beyond clear cut dichotomies between self and other. Special attention will be given to those people living at the border between tolerance and intolerance. I then offer a close reading of Derrida's deconstructions of hospitality as he develops them in some of his later works.

In relation to tolerance education, what Derrida draws to our attention is what we might call the dilemma of the host. In order to have a safe place of belonging from where we can welcome and include the other, we must preserve our identity and sovereignty against the unexpected arrival of the other; however, if we where completely successful at walling ourselves off form such interruptions, we would become unwelcoming and intolerant. Yet, so I will argue, the way out of this dilemma is not to choose for one of the options, but to give it a central place in our understanding of what it means to be a hospitable subject. By way of conclusion, I discuss how a move from tolerance and control to hospitality and risk may open up new spaces for welcoming the other, and consider what implications this has for advocating social justice in education.