This article questions the close relation between adult education and social action via the singular experiences of two outstanding figures in adult education, Gisèle de Failly and Nicole Lefort des Ylouses, during the nineteen thirties and forties, a fertile period in the history of both the social services and adult education. The connection or coordinated collaboration between the two fields, which appear to have started up in those years, were in fact the last signs of any close proximity. The author sees two reasons for this failure to communicate: on the one hand, the shift to technicality in the social services, and on the other, the overdetermination of the cultural and academic elements in the dominant referent of adult education.