The objective of this study is to encourage reflection on the need for a more holistic view of educational theories. The work seeks to create interactions between adult education theories, showing that different authors, from different theoretical streams of thought, share similar ideas. For this purpose, it used the theoretical model of Merriam and Caffarella (1999) which identifies five learning orientations: behaviorism, cognitivism, humanism, social learning and constructivism: A wide range of relationships was observed, among authors from different theoretical streams of thought, which demonstrates that although inexplicit, there is a sharing of premises among the main adult education theories.