This article explores the dilemmas involved in welcoming differences in education without simultaneously fostering structural conditions that reproduce discrimination and intolerance. Taking an excerpt from Fanny Abjörnsson’s doctoral thesis I en klass för sig (2004) and Jacques Derrida’s deconstructions of the concept of hospitality as points of departure, the article unfolds in three parts. First, I make a distinction between two ways of responding to the otherness of the other: a conditional welcoming of social categories, and an unconditional welcoming of radical difference. These are further explored in part two. In part three I turn to the “double responsiveness” Derrida highlights as inherent in the paradoxes of hospitality, and ask how it is possible to act within this tension in relation to education. I argue that the welcoming of differences in education demands sensitivity to ambiguity and uncertainty, as well as tact and improvisation in concrete pedagogical situations.