Based upon the criticism that the limitations of multicultural education as project of the state are
derived from the collective and essential concept of 'culture', this study aims to reconceptualize
'culture' as a multi-dimensional process and reconceptualize multicultural education as education
through the multicultural situations, in which diverse cultural powers conflict with each other. As
results, it is maintained that multicultural education is characterized as instrumental, cognitive, and
transcendent in each dimension of culture(law, tradition, and disposition). Instrumental multicultural
education is conceptualized as a process of creating the institutional and discursive condition for
equal participation of minority groups and cognitive multicultural education is as a process of
understanding the meaning and values of the tradition which conflicts with one's own. However,
these two dimensions of multicultural education could alienate the minorities without the
transcendent one, which is a process of receiving the minor one as the other, who cannot be
reduced to the attributes of any particular groups and of transforming oneself and the other by
obeying the orders of the other's face. In this vein, transcendent multicultural education is the core
process for the agents of multicultural education as project and needs to be emphasized in a
multicultural society like South Korea, in which immigrants do not identify themselves with the
collective tradition of the groups to which they used to belong.