The thesis focusses on the English higher grade schools of the later nineteenth century. It originated in a concern about the relevance of educational institutions to Britain's unique decline from world dominance to acute economic difficulties. The Introduction identifies the turn of the century as a time of gathering tensions in English public education, when the development of a popular and self-contained network of institutions was mounting a real challenge to the established system. The first Chapter surveys the common verdicts about higher grade schools --- a focus of those tensions --- in existing work; Chapter 2 identifies the characteristics of a 'typical' higher grade school --- locally conceived, offering a broad curriculum, and accessible to all social classes. The next two Chapters are a case study, tracing the optimistic development of higher grade schools in Bristol in the 1890s and then their battle for survival after 1902. Chapter 5 demonstrates that Bristol's experiences were duplicated in other parts of the country, as a secondary school system of a very different nature --- centrally controlled, attached to literary studies, and selective on the basis of cost --- was formulated. Amongst a number of unexpected findings was clear evidence that the egalitarian experience of girls in higher grade schools fits none of the existing interpretations of the history of women's education, a discovery which is explored in Chapter 6. Chapter 7 examines the educational principles which guided the resolution of tensions outlined in the Introduction, and finally the perspective broadens to reassess the higher grade school movement in the wider social, economic and cultural context. The conclusion reached is that the emergence of the higher grade schools represented an important example of a recurring alternative educational and cultural tradition in England. Their suppression constituted a major victory for traditional values, and a wasted opportunity of great and lasting significance.

One of the most perplexing problems in the psychology of aging is whether there are characteristic changes in aspects of personality over the life course. This study attempts to address issues relating to changes in the self-system believed to take place as individuals grow older. Of particular interest is what age differences exist in the four components of the objective self described by Atchley (1982): the ideal self, self-concept, self-esteem, and self-evaluation. In order to examine the differences in these components of the self between younger and older adults the following predictions are made: 1) the ideal self for older adults will be more highly interrelated to their present self-concept than will that of younger adults, 2) issues of self-esteem will be more salient in older versus younger adults, and 3) issues of self-evaluation will be more salient in older than in younger adults. A questionnaire developed by Dittmann-Kohli, (1990) containing 30 incomplete sentences asking for fears, desires, goals, time perspective, self-evaluation, and self-description was given to 110 individuals ranging in age from 17-43 and 89 persons ranging in age from 61-96. Results indicate only partial support for age changes in the self-system.

An important factor in system longevity is service-phase evolvability, which is defined as the ability of a system to physically transform from one configuration to a more desirable configuration while in service. These transformations may or may not be known during the design process, and may or may not be reversible. A study of 210 engineered systems was performed and found that system excess and modularity allow a system to evolve while in service. Building on these observations, this thesis introduces mathematical relationships that map a system's excess and modularity to that system's ability to evolve. These relationships are derived from elastic potential energy theories. The use of the evolvability measure, and other related measures presented herein, are illustrated with simple numerical examples and applied to the design of US Navy nuclear aircraft carriers. Using these relationships, it is shown that the Navy's new Ford-class aircraft carrier is the most evolvable carrier designed to date. Though the evolvability relationships introduced here are generically derived based on excess and modularity, the aircraft carrier example presented considers only the system excess.

(in English) This Master's Thesis is interested in the support of adoptive families in the Czech Republic. The aim of the thesis is to define possibilities of this support and stress the need to help people in the process of arranging adoption in the 21st century. The thesis describes the possibilities of supporting adoptive families in the chosen regions of the Czech Republic. Suggestions of different ways of helping and supporting adoptive families from experts are researched. The thesis is divided into two parts. The theoretical part of the thesis consists of four chapters. In the first chapter the term adopting is defined and different forms of this type of foster parenthood are introduced. This chapter also brings an overview of the historical development of adoption. The second chapter is interested in the specifics of adoption in the first 21st century, analyzes the needs of adopting families and stresses the importance of supporting the people involved in the different stages of the adoption process. The third chapter identifies the support of adopting families, and specifies the content, aims and the target group of the thesis. The last chapter is interested in describing different ways of supporting adoptive families in the Czech Republic and refers to places where adoptive families can...