Beauty is a nebulous idea -- impossible to confine. Beauty is like quality of which it has been said: "I don't know how to define it, but I know it when I see it." Beauty is the cousin of quality.
Beauty is easily found in nature, and frequently in the endless variety of human creativity. However, not nearly all of man's creation can be considered beautiful. Man has designed all manner of devices intended solely for destruction -- the various nuclear weapons, for example, being the most recent and most destructive. Man has also created systems for the enslavement, exploitation, and control of other men, i.e., the totalitarian state.
Any human system or practice which diminishes man's creativity and independence cannot be said to exemplify beauty. And so we come to the practice of standardized testing. We should ask ourselves if the goal of such testing is to find the aptitude of children or, if the goal is to help children discover their strengths and interests or, if the goal is to foster independence of thought and creativity? To all of the preceding the answer is: no! The goal is to find out how well children are fitting in to the program -- how well the pegs are being whittled down so they fit into the holes. The goal is to determine the level of compliance of schools and children.
Well-meaning people have designed such tests thinking that we can actually quantify teaching and learning. The effort is as fruitless as any attempt to quantify beauty. It can't be done. The practice has no respect for various gifts and talents, or for differences in human development. It seeks only to increase efficiency -- to standardize the product, and the manufacturing process. Standardized testing is simply the stuffing tube through which the sausage must pass. There is no beauty in it.
