In recent years the existence of scientific disciplines in the school curricula has been justified in terms of democratic participation of individuals in a society increasingly permeated by issues in which science and technology play a pivotal role. We argue, however, that in the Research in Science Education field the relationships between individual teaching-learning processes and the participation in the collectivity are analyzed under dualistic perspectives, due to cognitive-individualistic perspectives of human development that naturalize human processes and expect to derive from that a model of knowledge application and political action. Overcoming this dualism is only possible, at this historical moment, from a concrete alternative to those cognitive-individualistic perspectives, which express, in the ontological-epistemological level, the unity between human development, production/consumption of knowledge and maintenance of the status quo/ transformation of the reality. We aim to discuss human development under a historical perspective. We build on the convergences and complementarities between Activity Theory and Freirean perspective to give rise to a set of categories (Problem-in-itself; Problem-for-itself; and Ontology of being fully human), which we call Potential Activity. Those categories are able to express the objective dimension of human problems and the possibility to appropriate such problems in order to build human individuality and the human collectivity consciously. Thus, within this theoretical perspective, the issue about the relevance of science education and the role of a specific set of knowledge (scientific one) on human development can be concretely posed.