After finishing high school in 1958, Shajarian attended a teacher's training college. Upon graduation in 1960 he became an elementary school teacher in a village near Mashhad. Having left the stifling atmosphere of home to live in the college's dormitory, he felt free to pursue classical Persian music, known as the
radif, helped in this study by the college music teacher. He also learned to read notes and started playing the
santur, a kind of hammer dulcimer. In the same year he married a fellow student with whom he was to have four children, three daughters and a son. In 1965 he moved to Mashhad and to Tehran in 1967.
