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The objective of this article is to contribute to the analysis of the factors that influence the educational aspirations of boys & girls in the Czech Republic & vertical inequality in the Czech education system. Drawing on Mateju & Strakova's monograph Unequal Chances in Education, the authors enhance the discussion with a look at the gender aspect of choices of educational trajectory. The authors review existing theories to present the main arguments from research on educational aspirations by gender. They point out the ambiguity of studies to date on the effect of gender in the education system, as they have often arrived at contradictory findings. The authors look at the theories in which the differences in educational aspirations are related to gender & the theoretical & empirical arguments that reject gender as a category for distinguishing educational aspirations. The authors summarize the research to date on gender segregation in the education system, & then offer their own conclusions, based on a secondary analysis of data from the PISA-L in 2003. Their results reveal, in conformity with the analysis by Mateju & Strakova, that while according to these analyses gender does not have an effect on differences in the educational aspirations of boys & girls, it does have an effect on some aspects of the resulting segregation of the education system & thus on a student's choice of secondary school.

The article offers a brief account of the history of Hungarian sociology during four decades of communist rule in Hungary. Beginning with the brief existence of the first department of sociology in Hungary (the 'Szalai Institute', 1946-1948) the author describes the field in the 1950s, when for political reasons sociology was marginalized to the point of extinction. The revival of sociology in Hungary during the 1960s is devoted considerable attention from an institutional, a personal & a doctrinal point of view. The author analyses the main branches of study in Hungarian sociology at the time, including critical sociology & the study of social stratification, which overcame the rigidity of official Marxist-Leninist doctrine. She characterizes the last two decades of state socialism in Hungary as a period when sociology both suffered from increased political repression (stronger in the early 1970s than later) & at the same time became more & more professional. She argues that a determining feature of the history of Hungarian sociology between 1948 & 1989 was its strong connection to politics. However, sociology & politics had a mutual influence on one another during this period, as sociology also had an impact on the way Communist Party officials approached the structure of Hungarian society. In the process, sociology evolved & was professionalized, enabling its existence as an autonomous discipline today.

This article traces the effect of socio-economic, cultural, and gender factors on the reproduction of educational inequalities in access to tertiary education in the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Germany, Poland, and Sweden. Single- country analyses conducted to date on the Czech Republic have reached conflicting results both on the development of educational inequalities since the fall of socialism and on the weight of the factors behind those inequalities. Also, no international comparison has been conducted. Thus, the authors pursue two new directions of inquiry: 1) an international comparison, and 2) an update of the development of inequalities in all the mentioned countries since 2002. The authors used multi-dimensional statistical methods (logit models and a log-linear analysis) and the most recent available international data from the European Social Survey. The results revealed that out of all the countries studied it is in the Czech Republic that access to tertiary education is currently determined most by the cultural component of social background (the father's education). The country closest to the Czech Republic in this regard is Switzerland. The educational status of the family is also a crucial factor in educational reproduction in Sweden. Paradoxically, in the countries that historically and geographically are closest to the Czech Republic, namely, Poland and Germany, the crucial determinant in the transmission of educational status is the father's class.

The article focuses on the changes in the determination of educational aspirations that took place in the Czech Republic during its social, political and economic transformation. The aim of the article is to contribute to a deeper understanding of the changes in the stratification system after 1989, which were significantly influenced by changes in the causal mechanisms behind the formation of educational aspirations. Those changes in the determinants of educational aspirations were themselves largely driven by the expansion of economic returns to education and thus the increasing significance of education for life success. The empirical research is based on a comparison of data from the 'Family '89' (Rodina '89) survey conducted in January 1989 and the Czech module of the longitudinal survey PISA-L 2003. The analyses were carried out with the hypothesis that the social origin of the background family had a much stronger direct impact on the educational aspirations of adolescents in 1989, while in 2003 social origin had a much stronger indirect influence. The stronger direct impact in 1989 was due to the very limited access to higher education under socialism and the role higher education played in the reproduction of the cultural elite. But with the gradual expansion of, and the rapidly increasing returns to, higher education during the transition period, social origin began to have a largely indirect effect on aspirations, particularly through the value pupils began to place on higher education as a means of ensuring a higher degree of life success. The authors' empirical findings confirm the hypothesis about the change from direct to indirect effects and highlight the importance of researching educational aspirations from a historical point of view and in the context of social change.

In this article its author wanted to treat the history and presence of the system constitutional institutions competent for the area of conception, execution and control of security and defence policy of the Czech Republic and also addresses in short the function and content of the main security documents of the country. The author tried to sketch the institutional and documentary framework of the Czech security policy and to explain roles, relations and obligations of the highest-level constitutional bodies in the process of creation and carrying out of this policy (especially positions of the President, the Parliament, the Government and its so called power ministries and other important institutions). This text does not take a lot all this theme in detail, but it is more aimed at basic information and its target is to expound these problems to those interested, especially to foreign students. ; In this article its author wanted to treat the history and presence of the system constitutional institutions competent for the area of conception, execution and control of security and defence policy of the Czech Republic and also addresses in short the function and content of the main security documents of the country. The author tried to sketch the institutional and documentary framework of the Czech security policy and to explain roles, relations and obligations of the highest-level constitutional bodies in the process of creation and carrying out of this policy (especially positions of the President, the Parliament, the Government and its so called power ministries and other important institutions). This text does not take a lot all this theme in detail, but it is more aimed at basic information and its target is to expound these problems to those interested, especially to foreign students.

The article begins by citing selected examples of state intervention in the area of housing in the Czech Republic, which dates back to the founding of the First Czechoslovak Republic in 1918, & a brief description is provided of the most important milestones in the evolution of housing policy since 1989. The second part of the article is devoted to empirically testing the effectiveness of selected housing subsidies applied in the Czech Republic at the end of the 1990s. Housing affordability declined after 1989 & required the introduction of new social & housing policy tools. However, the goals of the new housing assistance programmes have often been laid out in very general terms, which, combined with the lack of data on the recipients, has complicated the execution of any kind of effective analysis. For this reason the selection of programmes submitted to the empirical analysis of effectiveness was limited to the following: housing allowance, rent regulation, & the tax deduction of interest from mortgages & housing saving scheme loans. The analyses showed that only the housing allowance met the selected effectiveness criteria.