Alice Sterling Honig is a Professor at Syracuse University in New York. This is an adaptation of an address presented at the Early Childhood Education Conference, "Joining Hands with Children," University of Minnesota, Duluth, Minn., September 28, 1984, and an address presented at the 3rd annual Park School Conference, October 19, 1985. proportions of training time that early childhood education specialists should be devoting to each of these three areas? In some programs in psychology departments (where early childhood educators may be required to take the psychology component of their training), much time in the infancy course is spent on learning about orienting reflexes of infants and the conditionability of the very young infant. Sometimes a course emphasizes cognition so exclusively that you learn a lot about transposition experiments, but you learn little about other aspects of the psychology of preschool behavior. So the fourth issue is: How should we apportion our professional learnings with respect to theory, practical experience, and research knowledge ? I find research knowledge extremely important and consider it "ammunition" for ECE workers. In our field if you say, "You shouldn't hit a child," there's bound to be someone in a class who says to you, "My daddy hit me when I was a kid and I've grown up OK." Or somebody will say, "If you don't take away privileges from a child and send him to bed without supper, how does he know who's boss? My parents did that and I grew up fine." If you don't know research knowledge, you will simply continue to have what anthropologists call conflicts in values and beliefs with other adults. Values are judgments of good or bad (e.g., "A good child is a quiet child"). Beliefs are our ideas about what aspects of experience are related (e.g., "An apple a day keeps the doctor away." "Spank a child; if you don't know what it's for, he will." "Picking up a baby will spoil him." "Intellectually gifted