This article addresses the pedagogical implications and possibilities that globalisation poses for educational policy and praxis as it relates to teaching about difference in an ever more diverse world. Among the most salient questions in an era of accelerated globalisation is how seemingly different cultures, civilisations, nationalities, ethnicities and races are to coexist peacefully in an increasingly borderless world, or whether they are forever destined to experience conflict based on cultural chasms in the guise of a ‘clash of civilisations’. This article highlights the tension between two perspectives on education: education as a force in cultivating intolerance and education as a panacea for intolerance. While not negating the potential for education to remedy social ills, we consider the extent to which education can produce change in the opposite direction. In the following pages, we present a context for our discussion of in/tolerance by providing an overview of the double‐edged, or Janus‐faced, qualities that both education and globalisation possess. We then draw on social‐psychological, anthropological and sociological literatures in bringing together three theoretical constructs—moral exclusion, the genocidal continuum and symbolic violence—in examining how intolerance is created and reproduced within educational settings. Following this overview, we present three vignettes to exemplify the teaching of intolerance in different historical and geo‐political contexts, namely, Nazi Germany, Rwanda and Israel. Finally, we conclude with recommendations that pay particular attention to the kind of education that that teaching of tolerance necessitates.