QIANNAN PREFECTURE, China--In a drafty cement building rented from a faltering state enterprise, amid the fields of hardscrabble Guizhou province, you will find the Qinnan Computer Vocational Technical High School.

The setting is old China, but everything else is revolutionary: Teachers are paid on merit, the school advertises on television, and its self-designed curriculum teaches computer skills to 160 teenagers from farming villages, most of whome had never seen a computer before.

Private schools are booming in China, easing the state's hold on young minds and bucking a traditional bias that only the elite deserves higher education. "I am very interested in computers and I can learn more here," says Huang Shen, a 17-year-old from a hamlet 60 miles away, working through a programming lesson in a spartan classroom lined with banks of computers.

A hunger for self-improvement, coupled with a dearth of spaces in state schools, is driving a surge in private education--even in remote Guizhou, one of China's poorest regions, where the number of college students equals only 4% of the middle-school population. China has more than 60,000 private schools, from kindergartens to colleges, most of which have sprung up during the past few years. A the higher levels they largely attract students who fail to test into state schools, but the well-managed institutions are already pushing their state-run rivals to reform.

The surprising spread of private education underscores the government's willingness to hand over some cherished monopolies to entrepreneurs. The need is dire: China's public universities have space for only 10% of high-school graduates, too few to supply skilled workers for a fast-modernizing economy. Last year, Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji officially endorsed the private schools at a national education conference, and Beijing is drafting laws to govern them.

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While private schools in the West are often bastions of the elite, China's serve a generation of have-nots who would otherwise lack opportunities for further study. It is a world that exists in parallel to the state-run educational system--and in many ways it's a better one.

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Among the area's five computer schools, students at Mr. Bi's school--the only one that is privately run--consistently score highest on a national computer skills test that many companies consider when hiring. In the town of Zunyi to the north, a vocational school run by another entrepreneurial principal has forced four state schools to merge to compete.

The Qiannan school has dispensed with outdated textbooks published by the Ministry of Labor in favor of commercial books that follow the fast-changing high-tech world. It also shuns rote learning--the preferred method of public schools--in favor of hands-on computer time for each student of "not less than two hours a day," according to a sales brochure.

Classrooms are filled with highly motivated kids who know this is their last chance to make good. Many heard about the school through friends of ads and came by to sign up, with their families sometimes selling cows and pigs to cover the $180 yearly tuition.

The poineering institutions still face discrimination from local officials--typical of Chinese reforms, in which progressive policies at the top trickle down slowly, or sometimes not at all, to the bureaucrats who rule daily life. The Qiannan school was forced to register as a private business four years ago because the local government didn't recognize private schools.

Most education experts say that China's top state schools--fabled names such as Beijing University and Tsinghua University--will continue to attract the country's best minds. But for the masses, private schools are expected to expand quickly to serve a growing need.