The banking model of education, as described by Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1970), characterizes conventional teaching as a process of depositing information into passive recipients. The teacher possesses knowledge; the student receives it. The more faithfully the student stores and reproduces the deposit, the more successful the education.
Freire argued that this model mirrors and reinforces structures of domination: it trains people to accept the world as it is presented to them rather than to question, investigate, or transform it. The banking model treats knowledge as a fixed quantity to be transmitted, not as something produced through inquiry, dialogue, and struggle.
Freire’s alternative is dialogic education, in which teacher and student investigate problems together.