“For in him we live and move and have our being, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also his offspring.’” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the errors Christians sometimes make is in thinking there’s nothing redeeming about the world at all. While we are to reject the world and its ways, the people in it were still created in God’s image even if they don’t recognize that. And, as bearers of God’s image, they will occasionally stumble across truth and get something right. This is usually accidental, but even as a broken clock is right twice a day, so the world sometimes gets it right. I was reminded of this in a recent episode of Abbott Elementary. Let me tell you how.

Abbott Elementary is usually pretty funny. That’s why we haven’t missed an episode in five seasons. Most episodes have laugh-out-loud funny moments. With kids in school (and until last year elementary school), and a wife who is a school secretary who experiences all the insanity that goes on between those four walls, the writing very often hits home. Sure, it’s set in an all-black school in inner-city Philadelphia, but the quirky personalities among the staff, crazy parents, spineless and utterly disconnected district leadership, and lovable if often maddening students is universal. The situations they write into the show may be over the top for the sake of comedy, but they are all rooted in reality.

The other thing about Abbott Elementary we have gotten used to filtering is that its outlook is pretty progressive. It’s politically progressive for sure. It’s also culturally progressive, and it trends in the direction of being educationally progressive. So, when something comes along to deviate from that norm, it catches my attention pretty quickly. When both plot lines in an episode do, that’s worthy of giving some of our attention on here. Well, this past week’s episode did just that.

This week’s was one of those episodes when both situations were faced down by the entire cast as a group. The first plot line was about Principal Coleman’s attempt to introduce a no-homework policy to the school. She did this because a college rival who is the principal of another school in the district announced she had done that to the approving nods of other principals. This caught my attention immediately because my kids’ elementary school and especially middle school basically operated on a no homework policy. That wasn’t official, and wasn’t entirely consistent, especially when they were younger, but they saw precious little of it compared with what I had.

The announcement, rather than being received well by the teachers was treated as an attempt to sabotage their lesson plans. Perhaps if it had been introduced before the year started they could have adjusted their plans to it, but March was not the right time. They used daily homework to help reinforce the day’s lessons so that the students were ready to move forward the next day with minimal time wasted on reviewing the previous day’s material. And, as they predicted, with that review taken away, the students were not retaining things, and educational advancement basically ground to a halt. Even parents were complaining about the policy.

In a shot across the educationally progressive policy, the teacher who was leading the charge against the switch, Mrs. Howard, announced that homework for students had worked just fine in the past and that she saw no reason that needed to change in the present or the future. This no homework trend was nothing but an educational fad that would come and go, but the traditional ways that had always worked would be the last ones standing.

For a show like Abbott Elementary to take such a strong stand against what has indeed been little more than a modern educational fad suggests there are some pretty significant cracks in the armor of the educational progressives. The educational tinkering that became really popular in the 80s and 90s accomplished nothing except to result in failing student performance nationwide. Seeing a return to time-tested basics like phonics and old school math and homework would be a good thing for our nation. The state of Mississippi, once the educational laughing stock of the nation did that a few years ago and in the most recent ranking of states, they jumped from dead last to 29th. That’s one place above my own state of North Carolina. Maybe a whole lot more states should consider getting back to the basics.

In the end, the teachers prevailed, calling out the erratic and insecurity-driven nature of the decision, and Coleman relented and reversed course. In a really interesting twist, when Coleman announced to the group of principals that they were going back to giving homework, her rival mockingly challenged her on it. Coleman responded by asking how her rival’s students were keeping up with their learning without the homework. She responded by saying that the students weren’t doing well, so instead of getting rid of the no homework policy, they had leaned harder into educational progressivism (okay, she didn’t use those words, but that’s what she did) by getting rid of grades and tests as well. They just let the students freely make their own way through their educational journey. Coleman looked straight at the camera and said something like, “Well, those students are going to fail.” Score one for conservative priorities in education.

That brings us to the secondary plot of the episode. This one hit home even more for me. One of the teachers, Mrs. Schemmenti, was sitting in the lounge toward the beginning of the episode and was playing with a sports prediction market app on her phone. She was loudly celebrating winning a few dollars on a particular game the night before. Over the course of the episode, she talks to anyone who would listen about her plans and strategy. All she has to do is put in a little bit of her own money, and if the prediction market move turns out correct, she gets double her money back. And, if she plays multiple days in a row, she gets an in-app currency that allows her to trade on even more futures for free.

Over the course of the episode one of the younger teachers who is actually her housemate (he’s twenty years younger and gay, so it really is just a situation of convenience for both of them), Mr. Hill, observes that she’s just gambling. To this suggestion she insists that she is not gambling at all. She is trading on market predictions, making entirely informed decisions on events with a high likelihood of outcome. If she was gambling she would be in a casino. She was using an app that has just come out and which everybody is using. By the end of the episode, though, when her losses have piled up to the point that her house is on the line, she finally realizes that, yes, she’s been gambling the whole time. The prediction market apps are all just gambling (and in particular spots betting) under another name and only an idiot or somebody entirely blinded by their gambling addiction can’t see that.

This one is a hobby horse of mine. I go out of my way to tell my kids how dumb sports betting is all the time. This is because I think sports betting is stupid, yes, but it is even more because I know that their generation has been bitten by the sports betting bug, and gambling addiction is a real threat to young men today. Where once gambling was seen as a bad habit and something that only happened in certain places, the introduction of app-based sports betting and the new “prediction market” apps, which are really just gambling that has found a loophole to escape regulation, has resulted in a huge spike in the number of especially young people who are gambling. And the results are not good. I just about danced a jig when I saw a show with as high a profile as Abbott Elementary not only point this out, but point out how stupid and ridiculous it is.

The church once developed a bad reputation as being anti-fun. Some of this wasn’t fair, and was encouraged by a secular culture that was actively looking to throw off the religious restraints on our culture so it could more freely dive into sin without being made to feel badly about it. Some of it was earned because in trying to counter sin in the culture the church often swung the pendulum too far in the opposite direction. We settled for being reactionary when careful, reasoned, critical engagement was what was necessary. But the church started out seeking to call the culture back from sin, sin that was going to cause all kinds of chaos and destruction if it was allowed to flourish. Sin always feels fun at first. Otherwise, no one would want to do it. But its end is deadly. Gambling is one of those things that feels fun, especially because you often win a bit at the beginning. But the house always wins in the end. And it unleashes all kinds of chaos in the lives of those who get trapped by it. It’s just not worth getting sucked into.

There’s really not a single, applicational payoff today. Like I said at the beginning, I just wanted to tell you about a time when the world got it right. Twice. The world is not the source of any wisdom, God is. But because the people in the world are made in the image of God, sometimes wisdom bubbles to the surface. And when the world agrees with the church that something is right, we should really pay attention. We don’t want to miss that lesson.