The phrase "abject lesson" is correct and usable in written English.
It is typically used to describe a lesson that is extremely unpleasant or humiliating, often serving as a warning or example of what not to do.
Example: "The company's failure to adapt to market changes was an abject lesson for all businesses about the importance of innovation."
Alternatives: "harsh lesson" or "stark warning".
For those who still don't get it, the previous century ought to stand as an abject lesson in what happens when societies are gripped by utopian manias.
On the other, it offered the most abject lesson the world has yet known in the genocidal atrocities that bigotry can unleash.
This is an abject lesson in how groupthink can take hold of even developed societies that pride themselves on their freedom of thought, debate and lack of deference; even the highly educated can be seduced into the tyranny of a fashionable orthodoxy.
"We had an abject lesson in how to play at Spotland from the Rochdale players.
It was more of an abject lesson in personal maintenance.
Kharkiv's Rainin points to the battles ravaging neighboring regions as an abject lesson on Ukraine relying too heavily on a single export market.
Just as the atrocities of Nazism are abject lessons on the dangers of nationalism, racism, and anti-semitism, so the history of communist crimes teaches the dangers of socialism.
Perhaps it's time to move onto Lesson 2: abject apologies with presents.
Campbell also criticized the film, describing it as a "lesson about abject failure", writing "no matter how you slice it, the film was a dog, and everyone involved can pretty much line up and take forty whacks.
For the actor Colin Firth, history lessons at school were "abject misery".
Not because Italian-American gangsters are any smarter or more ruthless than the others, but because the law enforcement community has learned important lessons from its prior years of abject failure in curtailing the Mafia.
