INTRODUCTION 3 fate of the all-India teachers' strike of 1987. Bureaucratization of education had then proved a powerful rallying-cry for teachers in Delhi. It probably had less appeal in regions where such official control was not a new threat, but a fact of life for years. There is al6o a fairly underspread feeling that educational standards in most places have become so abysmal that centrally-planned and managed intervention is the only way out or at least seen as a lesser evil. The debate about educational reform thus gets linked up with much broader issues:, for the extent to which progress can or should be achieved in centralized, technocratic ways, has become a central theme for discussion today in advanced capitalist, third world, and socialist countries alike. Sumit Sarkar (On behalf of editorial team for special issue)