object lesson

object lesson (plural object lessons)

1. A lesson taught (especially to young children) using a familiar or unusual object as a focus.
2. An example from real life that explains a principle or teaches a lesson.
   • 2012, Caspar Henderson, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, page 107:

     Vertebrates are limited to two eyes each, but the variations they have played on this plain vanilla starting point are an object lesson in how much can be made from a little.

3. Anything used as an example or lesson which serves to warn others as to the outcomes that result from a particular action or behavior, as exemplified by the fates of those who followed that course.

   Let that be an object lesson to him.

   • 2021 December 1, “Network News: Integrated Rail Plan: Osborne predicts HS2 eastern leg will return”, in RAIL, number 945, page 8:

     Of the announcement, Osborne said: "They have spent a hundred billion pounds of public money and they've got a massive raspberry from everyone as far as I can see. As a PR exercise, it's been an object lesson in how not to make a government announcement."

   • 2022 March 17, Paul Krugman, “Another Dictator Is Having a Bad Year”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN:

     Yet China, like Russia, is now giving us an object lesson in the usefulness of having an open society, where strongmen don’t get to invent their own reality.

   • 2022 October 25, Derek Thompson, “How the U.K. Became One of the Poorest Countries in Western Europe”, in The Atlantic‎:

     The U.K. is now an object lesson for other countries dealing with a dark triad of deindustrialization, degrowth, and denigration of foreigners.

   • 2023 June 30, Marina Hyde, “The tide is coming in fast on Rishi Sunak – and it’s full of sewage”, in The Guardian‎:

     Thames Water has become the latest object lesson in the predictable and predicted folly of privatised monopolies, aided by a regulator that’s an even bigger wet wipe than the fatbergs bunging up the sewers.

• life lesson

• “object lesson”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.