Paulo Freire (2000) argued that schools function very much like banks; teachers deposit information into students' minds through one-way transference. According to this “banking concept of education” (Freire, 2000, pp. 72-73), students have no agency or role in these transactions that reflect the stance of an oppressive system.
Within the banking model, learners are not taught how to evaluate the knowledge they are being provided. Students are not invited to interrogate the validity of the knowledge imparted by more expert authority. Young people are not free to explore ideas that may contribute to bodies of existing knowledge. Perhaps most problematically, students remain impoverished automatons as they can only "preserve a profitable situation" (Freire, 2000, p. 73) for their oppressors, whether teachers or larger power structures.