Throughout the Spanish Golden Age there was a continual debate about orthography. The push to establish a spelling system that reflected the shifting state of the Spanish language during this period—when Cervantes penned Don Quixote and Mateo Alemán published Guzmán de Alfarache—inevitably led orthographers to offer their reflections and judgements on how reading and writing should be taught (Esteve, 2007; Martínez, 2010). The debate amongst orthographers took an unexpected turn at the beginning of the 17^th century, when references to teachers, children, and the teaching of reading and writing became frequent. With Mateo Alemán’s Ortografía castellana (1609), we can see for the first time what we could consider to be a pedagogical argument (Gómez Camacho, 2014): phonetic and traditional spelling was defended because it helped children learn to read and write (Gómez Camacho & Casado, 2016). 

Mateo Alemán is undoubtedly an essential author in classic Spanish literature; nevertheless, his fictional and philological texts on teachers, teaching, and children remain virtually unanalysed. In Ortografía castellana, Alemán sets forth specific ideas on education, founded on both a profound interest in pedagogy and the analysis of the predominant approaches to teaching reading and writing at the end of the 16^th century, and which stood in contrast to the picaresque method of learning through literary fiction. Mateo Alemán deemed his spelling system, which was based on the joint learning of reading and writing in primary schools and was devised expressly with the aim “that children may learn,” to be “the good writing method.” It would be two centuries before this considerable reform to the Spanish educational system became widespread in Spain: “What issue would there be for children to learn to read and write simultaneously?” (Alemán, 1609, p. 25). In order to teach children reading and writing concurrently, it was necessary to move away from the writing models of the scribes and master calligraphers. At the same time, Alemán drafted a similarly revolutionary proposal to simplify letters and strip them of their adornments, though this did not occur in Spain for almost another 200 years (Viñao, 2002 a & b).

Miguel Sebastián, a presbyter and professor of rhetoric at the University of Zaragoza, published Orthografía y ortología in 1619. In spite of its title, the book is a primer that continually refers to pronunciation, orthology, orthography, and teaching methods—in stark contrast to other works on the same subject (Laspéras, 1995; Lope, 1997). This text is clearly the work of a teacher with an interest in teaching and literacy, and who prided himself on his ideas: “We have been using it to teach children in our village for over thirty years now” (Sebastián, 1619, n.f.).

Just as Mateo Alemán had done before, Sebastián dedicated a chapter of his text to musings on teaching, though in this case as his conclusion: “Rules for achieving a clear distinction between oral and written language” (Sebastián, 1619, f. 61r). We can ultimately summarise his pedagogical ideology in three rules: town halls must regulate primary schools; writing teachers ought to use “good books by good authors” (Sebastián, 1619, f. 68v); and above all, reading and writing must be taught independently—“Moreover, those who teach reading should not teach writing, as they place a high value on writing and they dismiss reading (Sebastián, 1619, f. 68r).

Miguel Sebastián took the teaching of reading and writing as independent processes to an extreme, though his modern vision had little to do with the defence of the traditional methods that were ubiquitous in Spanish primary schools until the 19^th century (Infantes & Martínez, 2003).

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