This paper argues for a rethinking of what constitutes intercultural education focusing on the problem that emerges when Western paradigms of knowledge are privileged as universal model. This interrogation of the epistemological foundations to intercultural education is done against the backdrop on current trends within education where it is possible to diagnose an intensified preoccupation with the Other as part of a broader turn towards difference, anchored in ethics, tolerance and interculturality. Not least apparent by the ways the UNESCO emphasise that education today is the primary arena for understanding interculturality and generating the skills necessary for everyone living in today’s culturally diverse and globalised world: ‘Intercultural Education provides all learners with cultural knowledge, attitudes and skills that enable them to contribute to respect, understanding and solidarity among individuals, ethnic, social, cultural and religious groups and nations’ (2006, p. 37). In viewing education as an instrument for interculturality, however, there is a tendency to read interculturality as a problem of knowledge; that is to say, interculturality is often framed in educational terms as what we need to know in order to eradicate the borders between us. Thus, the question of interculturality gets rerouted along an epistemological path. Determining what constitutes the right kind of knowledge now becomes highly significant to teaching and learning since the basic premise of such a stance is that the more we know about them, the easier it is for us to approach them, to respond to them, to integrate them. While the focus inevitably is on the Other as the object of our knowledge, it must be remembered that knowledge, from this point of view, is conceived as available to everybody everywhere, regardless of place of birth, skin colour, belief, educational trajectory, sex and sexuality.