San Antonio's educational heritage is as old as the city itself. A mission-based educational system was used by the founding Spanish as a necessary first step in colonizing the New World. Their plan called for Spanish missionaries to convert enough native people to establish Spanish Christianity in the region. Thus, schools for the native inhabitants were of supreme importance as education was the means to win the hearts and minds of the indigenous peoples.

The first friars in charge of these missions schools were Franciscans from the competing colleges of Zacatecas and Queretaro in Mexico. The College of Santa Cruz in Quertaro was the first Catholic college in the New World and was founded in 1683, primarily to oversee the establishment of other missions in Spain's New World colonies. The College of Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe de Zacatecas was established in 1707 in Northern Mexico and oversaw the Texas missions, including those at Bexar, through the late 1700's. Father Gaspar José de Solís who presided as master of the Zacatecas college, made a journey to visit the Texas missions of the school in1767-68 and his travel journal of the trip has proven to be an important source of information about Texas and Bexar at the time.

The first attempt to found a traditional school in 1798 did not succeed, however, as there was little support for it. The boys it attempted to teach were mainly occupied, as was the town as a whole, with the more basic activities of survival on the frontier. In 1803, a future signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, Jose Francisco Ruiz, was appointed schoolmaster but his school did not last long, either.

Considering the city's strong Catholic heritage, it is no surprise that the city's first true educational institution, the girls' school Ursuline Academy, was founded in 1851 by seven Ursuline nuns. The sisters, led by Sister St. Marie Trouard, moved to San Antonio from New Orleans and Galveston and established a girl's boarding school on the San Antonio River at Augusta Street. Here the Academy stayed until 1965 when new facilities were constructed on the city's northwest side. Ursuline Academy is still owned by the Ursuline order, although a board now oversees its operation. Its former campus, designed by San Antonio architect Francois Giraud, is now the site of the Southwest School of Art and Craft.

The original buildings are architecturally signficant for use of the pise de terre technique that Giraud and another architect, Jules Poinsard, employed in their construction. This method uses local materials, rock, straw, and clay which are compressed by hand. The buildings, restored by the SSAC, are now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

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