I have been thinking about a word in reverse.

Roma. Spelled backwards: Amor. Love.

That simple inversion changed how I see everything. It is not a trick or a game. It is a philosophy. It says: nothing is fixed. What looks like one thing from where you stand might be something entirely different from the other side. And if you are willing to turn it around — if you are willing to look again — you will find love at the center of almost anything.

I believe curiosity works the same way.

Curiosity is not a personality trait you either have or you do not. It is not a gift given to some people and withheld from others. It is a practice. A direction. A way of staying alive to the world long after school has told you the lesson is over.

And what I have found — across five very different cultures, in five very different corners of the world — is that the cultures that thrive are the ones that never stopped treating learning as love.

Barcelona: A City That Decided to Reimagine Learning from Scratch

I did not expect a city to make me rethink education.

But Barcelona did.

What is happening in Barcelona is not a school reform. It is a redesign of what learning is allowed to be. Platforms like Learnlife are asking a radical question: what if education was built around the learner, not around the institution? What if curiosity was the curriculum?

Barcelona has also committed itself — at the level of city governance, through its Agenda 2030 — to becoming a lifelong learning city. Not a smart city. Not a productive city. A learning city. A place where the education does not end when you leave the classroom.

I think that choice reveals something important. It says that a city becomes more human — not more efficient — when it decides that every person, at every age, deserves to keep growing.

And there is something deeply “amore in parallel” about that. When you build a city around curiosity, you are building it around love. One does not replace the other. They travel together.

Singapore: When a Government Decides Curiosity Is a National Strategy

Singapore is one of the most quietly radical countries in the world.

I say quietly, because the ambition is enormous but the language around it is measured. Singapore’s SkillsFuture movement — a national investment that gives every citizen access to learning credits, courses, and development opportunities across their entire career — is not framed as charity or support. It is framed as belonging. As identity.

The goal embedded in their “Learn for Life” strategy is not to produce better workers. It is to produce people who are genuinely curious. People for whom learning is not a phase of life but a permanent feature of it.

I have seen what happens when institutions treat adults like they are done learning. The curiosity does not disappear — it goes underground. It finds other outlets or it quietly fades.

Singapore decided to refuse that. They decided that the question “what do you want to learn next?” should never stop being asked — not at twenty-two, not at forty-five, not at sixty-eight.

That is not education policy. That is a love letter to human potential.

China: 2,500 Years of Knowing That Learning Is Never Complete

Confucius said it first.

More than 2,500 years ago, the philosophy at the center of Chinese education was already pointing toward something the modern world keeps rediscovering: learning is not a destination. The Junzi — the ideal person in Confucian thought — is not born with wisdom. The Junzi is made, slowly, through a lifetime of study, reflection, and moral development.

This is not about academic pressure. This is about something much older and more beautiful than that. It is the belief that the person who is still asking questions is the person who is still growing. That you do not arrive at wisdom — you practice toward it, endlessly.

Roma es amor in its most ancient form.

What I find remarkable about the Confucian tradition is that it never separated intellectual learning from becoming a better human being. The goal was not just to know more. The goal was to be more. To act with more compassion, more fairness, more clarity.

When I read that, I do not see a rigid system. I see a culture that understood — long before we had the language for it — that curiosity and love are the same motion. That you cannot genuinely want to understand the world without also caring about it.

India: When the Forest Was the Classroom

The Gurukul.

I did not grow up with this word, but when I learned what it meant, I recognized something I had always believed but never had the language for.

In ancient India, education did not happen in a building with rows of desks. It happened in forests, in ashrams, in the spaces between a teacher and a student who lived and worked and questioned together. The Guru did not deliver information. The Guru walked alongside. And the student — the Shishya — was not there to absorb. They were there to grow.

The subjects were everything: mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, music, healing. But the method was curiosity. The teacher’s job was to fan the flame, not control it.

What strikes me is that India’s National Education Policy, revised in 2020, is in many ways a return to this. A recognition that the best education this country ever produced was the one that treated learning as a living thing — not a set of facts to be memorized, but a relationship to be sustained.

That is amore in parallel. The teacher curious about the student. The student curious about the world. Both growing at the same time, in the same direction.

South America: Reading the Word and the World

Paulo Freire changed education.

Not just in Brazil. Everywhere.

What Freire understood — and what his Pedagogy of the Oppressed gave language to — is that real learning cannot be separated from the world the learner lives in. The “banking model” he criticized, where teachers deposit knowledge into passive students, is not just ineffective. It is a form of disconnection. It tells the student: your life does not matter here. Leave it at the door.

Freire’s model said the opposite. He said: read the word and read the world. Bring everything you are into what you are learning. Your community. Your history. Your questions. Your anger. Your love.

That is popular education. And it spread across South America because it worked — not because it was efficient, but because it was true.

Today, eighteen Latin American countries are investing in socio-emotional learning as a complement to academic education. Communities are building the spaces that formal schools often cannot. People are learning because they want to understand their lives, not just pass a test.

I believe that is what perpetual learning looks like at its most honest. Learning that belongs to the person, not the institution.

What All Five Places Are Really Saying

I am not a researcher. I am a person who pays attention.

And what I see, when I look at Barcelona and Singapore and China and India and South America, is not five different education systems. I see five different expressions of the same idea.

That curiosity is not something you schedule into Tuesday afternoons.

That learning does not stop at graduation, or at thirty, or at any other arbitrary line.

That the people who stay alive to the world — who keep asking, keep discovering, keep being surprised — are not the ones who were born different. They are the ones who never let themselves stop.

And here is what I think is the real secret: they did not keep learning because they were disciplined. They kept learning because they loved it.

Roma es amor. Turn it around and you find love at the center.

Amore in parallel. Let curiosity and love travel together and neither one fades.

This is not about productivity. This is not about career development or upskilling or any of the language we use to make learning sound like work. This is about the most human thing there is: the desire to understand.

I believe success — the kind that actually feels like something — is not about arriving at an answer. It is about remaining genuinely interested in the question.

That is perpetual learning. Not as a strategy. As a way of being.

A Final Reflection

I think we have been measuring the wrong things for a very long time.

We measure what students can recall under pressure. We measure test scores and graduation rates and salary outcomes. We measure almost everything except the one thing that determines whether any of it was worth it:

Did they leave wanting to learn more?

Across five cultures, in five different languages, with five different histories, the answer has always been the same. The best thing an education can do is not fill you up. It is to make you hungrier.

Barcelona is building cities for learners. Singapore is investing in citizens who never stop growing. China has been honoring the student-for-life for millennia. India’s Gurukul tradition understood that knowledge and humanity are the same pursuit. South America’s popular education movement proved that learning becomes transformative when it belongs to the learner.

None of these are perfect systems. No system is.

But they are all pointing in the same direction.

Toward the person who wakes up still curious. Who asks questions that have no easy answers. Who is not afraid to turn a word around and find something unexpected on the other side.

That person is not exceptional. That person is possible — everywhere, for everyone.

Roma es amor.

Nothing is absolute. All curiosity is welcome.

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