The article offers an account of the devel-opment of Czech social pedagogy from its origins to the present day. In the first section the author considers its beginnings, associ-ated with the name of G. A. Lindner. In the secondparthe analysis the period from 1918 to the end of the 2nd World War. A range of ideas and publications that are in some way connected with social pedagogy appeared in this period but social pedagogy was still not conceived as an academic discipline and un-like in Germany or Poland no major defining work was published on the subject and it had no important representative.
In the third part the author characterises the post-war era right up 1989. This period had two different phases. Up to the mid-1960s sociology was typically banned, and so social pedagogy - which is closely related to sociology, did not exist here. From the late 1960s however, as with sociology, there was nothing in the way of its development. Still, we find only timid attempts to constitute a social pedagogy and overall the term appears only rarely.
The breakthrough for the development of Czech social pedagogy came with 1989, and since then there has been a great upswing in the subject. With little in the way of tradition to draw on, the early 1990s were marked by various different approaches and searching. Gradually the situation has stabilised and today it can be said that the concept of social education has crystallised a special academic discipline concerned with the social aspects of the education process in two fields. First there is the question of the role of education in compensating for social disadvantage in part of the population - a role that requires a specific approach, and second the question of prophylaxis, i.e. the role of education in forming a healthy lifestyle that is the best prevention for all kinds of social deviation.