Yan Yuan, the most distinguished educationalist in the early Qing, experiences three changes in his lifelong academic explorations, namely, pro-Lu, pro-Cheng and Zhu, and his own pragmatism just contrary to his predecessors. So, his educational thought of pragmatism is taken as a breakthrough of the educational philosophy of the sciences of Song and Ming dynasties. In addition, he criticizes the previous educational thoughts, saying they are all useless, while he strongly advocates pragmatic learning, aiming at the students of pragmatism.