Concordia Magazine 2025

Beyond the classroom

Alexander Margolin (2002–2009) reflects on how his time at Merchant Taylors’ shaped a journey to improve education for thousands of children in Tanzania. I look back at my time at Merchant Taylors’ with extreme gratitude, realising now that the School was not just teaching academic subjects but instilling the values needed to become a well-rounded person. I certainly did not appreciate that at the time, nor do I expect any student reading this to have that level of awareness. But when people compliment me on any success I may have had in business or philanthropy, I leave them with the same sentiment: Merchant Taylors’ gave me the tools and I am simply applying them. I would not be the same person if I had not attended MTS, and deep down the School sparked a passion inside me for education — not in the traditional sense (I never wanted to be a teacher), but a belief in the transformative power of education to shape lives. That idea planted a seed which has grown into my journey of helping the next generation of children to get a better education. That suggests that my journey was linear, as if I always knew I would end up helping thousands of children in school programmes in Africa, but it certainly wasn’t. After I left Merchant Taylors’ I studied Experimental Psychology at the University of Bristol; in 2012 I graduated and was accepted on to the Allianz Graduate Programme. On paper everything looked perfect. I had followed the path we are all encouraged to take: school, university,

career. After a few years, however, something felt not quite right. I enjoyed my job and my life in London, but I had a continuing urge to travel. I knew it would be reckless simply to quit my job, so instead I used my four weeks’ allocated holiday each year to pack a backpack and travel the world. On one of those trips, in 2016, I went to Guatemala and Belize. With three friends, I was going to travel the country from hostel to hostel, seeing the sights and enjoying lots of partying (that was the playbook). But something happened to me on that trip that I had not experienced before. The sites were great, the hostels were fun; but for the first time in my life I really paid attention to the world around me. This was not simply a place to visit, to tick off in a box and to photograph for sharing on Facebook. These were real people living real lives — places, people and lives far removed from my own. As we travelled, I was struck by an immense feeling of guilt. Why was I so lucky to have been born in London, to a middle-class, loving family that afforded me a world-class education? It was complete luck. I could just as easily have been born to a family living in a poor village on the outskirts of Antigua, Guatemala. My ego was shaken. My successes were not of my own making; This feeling grew during our trip, and while sitting at the back of a bus on many long journeys I wrote out a plan — slides and all. I was going to find a way to help others living in worlds miles from my own. I am not too embarrassed to say that I spent the final night of my trip, on an island somewhere near Belize, in floods of tears. How could I have been so naive? How could I have been so unaware of the world around me? they were simply the result of the fortunate cards I had been dealt.

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