The general question in this dissertation is whether the democracy of schools is carried out in a gender equal manner in Sweden’s gender segregated upper secondary school. Students’ experiences of school democracy are measured using the dimensions of influence, discussion and legal rights. Three different explanatory factors are considered: the significance of gender, gender context and the character of the school programmes for these experiences. The study is based on student responses to a poll conducted in the top form classes of Kronoberg County’s upper secondary schools during the school year 2008/2009. The results of a series of regression analyses show that neither gender, gender context or programme character alone had an affect on experiences of school democracy. However, the more males present in a teaching environment, the poorer the experiences of influence and discussion are when all of the three explanatory factors are controlled for. In addition, the school programmes having male-coded character content particularly stand out favourably regarding school democracy. The number of males is usually high in such programmes and therefore the negative effects of male representation cancel out the positive effects of programme affiliation unless an explicit division is made of both of these aspects. Thus, keeping gender context and programme character separate is very important with studies of school democracy, since significant effects otherwise remain hidden. The study demonstrates that school democracy is important for students. Those students who have good experiences of school democracy perceive the school environment as significantly better than those who have poor experiences of school democracy. Concerning secondary effects, it appears that experiences of school democracy have different implications for learning among female and male students. There is a negative relationship between male experiences of influence and their grades in Swedish and Maths, while female experiences of discussion seem to show a positive covariance with grades. There is no relationship found in the data between students’ daily experiences of school democracy and their thoughts on voting in the upcoming parliamentary election.

This thesis deals with the topics of value orientation, value of education and reasons for early-quits schools both generally and particularly focused on SOŠ and SOU Písek. The theoretical part defines basic terms such as value, and value orientation of adolescents and determinants which influence the youth´s values. Furthermore, the thesis describes the system of higher secondary education in the Czech Republic and selected EU countries. It introduces the strategy of education policy to year 2020 and depicts the present situation at SOŠ and SOU Písek. The matter of concentration is occurrence of early-quits schools in the Czech Republic in comparison with selected EU countries. Moreover, the thesis presents findings of some Czech as well as international researches. The practical part goes into the empiric research which is focused on values of education and practical reasons of early-quits school at SOŠ and SOU Písek. The research particularly investigates the fact whether these students find education important and what the practical reasons of early-quits are at this school.

For whom the educational system should be available, what it should contain and what it should lead to, are all questions but with different answers. In this dissertation, these answers are understood as products of relations including a power dimension. As these relations constantly changes, the discursive struggle of defining the educational system is constant. Said struggle also contains different constructions of the student subject; what she/he ought to be and should become. It is the struggle of defining the student subject that is the focus of this dissertation. As a starting point for the analysis, a political discourse theory is used, developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (2001). The main aims of the dissertation are to analyze 1) How the student subject is defined and positioned in the analyzed policy texts 2) What kind of relations that are constituted among student subjects and in between student subject, working life and social life 3) How does the conditions of the discursive struggle make impact of the space for political subjectivity. The empirical material is Swedish Political documents written between the time periods 1990-2009. The analysis of the discursive political struggle shows three dominant subject positions structured in partly different discourses: The successful and free student, produced in the discourse of liberation (1990-1998), the individualized and solidary student, produced within the discourse of nostalgia (1997-2005) and the dutiful and adaptable student, which dominates the political struggle in 2006-2009, produced in the discourse of harmony. Although the subject positions are constituted within three different discourses, structured by partly different logics, they share an idea; the idea of an ongoing globalization. These articulations are not questioned and cannot be ignored in the discursive struggle. They are understood as disarticulations of an English/American neo-liberal discourse. To win a hegemonic position, the discourse of liberation, nostalgia and harmony, has to adopt signs from this neo-liberal discourse. They are also forced to rearticulate the intent of specific signs so they fit into each discourse’ inner logics. The disarticulations of the neo-liberal discourse which goes across the discursive borders are in this dissertation understood as a social fantasy.

With potential of increased efficiency and a broader range of services, inter-municipal cooperation is often presented as a universal solution to public welfare challenges. Today, all Swedish municipalities are involved in inter-municipal cooperation in various policy areas. However, little is known about the municipalities’ capacity to coordinate their cooperation arrangements in the complex network of institutions and overlapping territories that characterise the regional level of governance. Building on the institutional collective action framework and the concept of governance capacity, this study examines how the municipalities’ capacity for regional coordination of upper secondary education in the city region of Örebro County varies depending on the institutional structures, the opportunities for cooperation and the social capital that embed the inter-municipal arrangements. The empirical study is based on a mixed method approach; where a qualitative content analysis of public documents is combined with interviews of representatives from different inter-municipal arrangements in Örebro County. By analysing how inter-municipal cooperation on upper secondary education has emerged and developed in Örebro County, this study shows how the municipalities have established institutions at two different levels. In Örebro County, regional networks and contracts operate in parallel with local agreements and municipal associations with delegated authority – only including a few municipalities in the city region. Several of the cooperation arrangements also include actors from the private sector and different levels of governance. The emergence of these inter-municipal cooperation arrangements can be interpreted as an institutional outcome of the municipalities' intrinsic motives to ensure a wide range of education to their local citizens as well as the need to secure the supply of skills and workforce in private and public sector. But it can also be interpreted as a strategy for the smaller municipalities to ensure their influence and governance capacity in the city region – which has a built- in power asymmetry linked to the municipalities’ heterogeneity. The emergence of the cooperation arrangements also illustrates a path dependent development, where the municipalities’ historical collaboration tradition determines which institutions that emerge and to which degree social capital can be established. Particularly noteworthy in the emergence of the inter-municipal cooperation in Örebro County is the presence of government, which manifests itself through conditional financing of the inter-municipal cooperation arrangements. Thus, within one and the same geographical city region, and within one and the same policy area, there is an overlap of different inter-municipal collaborative arrangements and functional regions, which has emerged in a symbiosis of both horizontal and vertical relations. As a result, the regionalisation that the municipalities create “bottom up”, through voluntary cooperation, work in parallel with the regionalisation that is created “top down”, through formal regional institutions.

This study is based on the presumption that language is fundamental to the construction of knowledge. In addition, linguistic demands are incorporated in the policy documents of the upper secondary edu­cation of Sweden; students shall, during their education, be given the opportunity to appropriate certain linguistic tools. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how teachers and students in upper secondary education manage and utilize the discourse of social science in both speech and writing. More specifically, two classes are studied during three terms. The teachers’ ability to organize and support the students vocally and in written is examined, so are the effects of the teaching on students’ writing. The origin of the study is constituted by a sociocultural stance provided by Vygotskij, Bakhtin and Halliday. A combination of a functional perspective on language and a cognitive is probed, where the study is comparative in nature consisting of an experimental class and a control class. The importance of language for the creation of knowledge has been communicated to the teachers of the experimen­tal class, with provided complementary subject didactic literature. This literature offers support for teachers to augment the use of explicit teaching and enhance student awareness of how conceptual structures mould social science. Qualitative analyses are performed on the basis of teacher-student dialogue and written tasks by a group of selected students. The ana­lytical tools object language – metalanguage, linguistic operations and knowledge structures are developed for the purpose of processing data, and have been combined with the tools activity analysis, subject-related concepts and text activity. The results from the analyses display no difference in the handling of the discourse of social science between the experimental class and the control class. The teachers of the experimental class, like the teacher of the control class, are primarily utilizing object language where knowledge structures are visible, as opposed to a combination of object language – metalanguage. Furthermore, they exhibit diminutive use of dialogue in their teaching. The students of both classes, on their hand, demon­strate an equal progress in textual development. This study concludes that the experimental class has not been provided with sufficiently explicit support to advance in the struc­turing of knowledge and in level of reasoning. A more efficient support to teachers to manage these analytical tools would, in all probability, give them, and through this the students, an increasingly profound insight into structuring of text activities, the meaning and signalling of linguistic operations, the construction of subject-related concepts and, most importantly, how these three tools are interrelated.