The "knowledge society" is upon us according to global policy, and it is shaping the ways in which we communicate, define borders, define knowledge, define citizenship, and shape our social institutions. No longer are we focused on production and efficiency as in the industrial era. Instead we are focused on lifelong learning, active citizenship, and the knowledge worker (Field, 2000; Naval, Print, Veldhuis, 2002). Our future development rests on our ability as citizens to develop a new kind of awareness and knowledge about living in the world today. As such, we need to rethink our educational institutions to prepare us for living in the knowledge society. The question is: what is knowledge and who decides? The "knowledge society" is a big concept driven mostly by technological and economic thinking (Mokyr, 2002) and now people are beginning to question what it means in relation to human and social relations and learning (Mason, 1998; Naval, Print, Veldhuis, 2002). Further, many are questioning whether the knowledge society is shaped for the good of the common or for the benefit of big business. Are we repeating the crisis in Brazil that Freire wrote about in his landmark book: Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), or are we truly in a new century of school and community development led by the notion of networks (Castells, 1996) and collaboration in a democratic society?Central to the policy discussions about the knowledge society is the interplay between quality, globalization, and knowledge. How do we as a global educational community develop a measure of knowledge and quality education that is both reflective of the principles of education in the 21st century, and cross- culturally meaningful? There are a variety of models of quality measurement implemented today, including inspection, benchmarking, and national testing. In many countries, experience has shown that measuring quality has become paradoxical in that indicators for success define curriculum, which in turn defines pedagogy. Thus it becomes important to explore the ways in which these practices not only measure knowledge but also support pedagogical development for learning, rather than create a bureaucratic structure for managing the "new mass policy" across multiple culturesIn this paper we present an analytical discussion of different European documents related to the knowledge society and globalization, and the relation to models of quality measurement found in different school systems throughout Europe. Implications of the educational policy and quality models are explored with respect to the pedagogical development at the school level and the formation of the knowledge society.