Paulo Freire, worried about an education emerging from the people who were emerging as a political subject and of their history, in the democratic opening through Brazil, moved towards a strategic reading of European sources and their tradition. He engaged in a critical dialogue, with a view to building a theory of human beings, with existenalism, marxism, phenomenology and the Frankfurt School. The aim of our work is to analyse the critical awareness category present in this anthropological model, its implications and relationships with other fundamental categories of the model. We propose this inquiry in dialogue and debate with the central problems of Latin American philosophical thinking, which account for the main processes of emancipation in Latin America, and enable us to operate interruptions to Eurocentric philosophy. We therefore consider that our approach, from a perspective of critical Latin American thinking, will allow us to better understand one of the concerns of Freire’s entire work: the constant struggle for alienation free education, which respects the ‘ontological vocation of the human being to be more’.