As the world works towards 2015 when it will finally assess the progress it has made towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals it set for itself at Jomtien in 1991, it has become clear that important gains have been made in education. Equality of access has been, understandably, at the top of the world policy agenda for the last 20 years or more. As the discussion has become more complex it has become clear, however, that access by itself is insufficient. What also matters is the "kind" of education that is being made available to learners and students. In deconstructing what equality means, the issue of quality has become central. This essay seeks to address the difficulties of the general approach to quality. The central difficulty is that the approach to quality--what should be the core characteristic of education--remains comprehensible only in quantitative terms, making quality in the end a limited value.