I already responded to some of your concerns in the reply
to Dan. Let me add a little more. After spending three decades
in teaching I am convinced that being 100% correct is not enough.
To be an effective teacher one has to add some "logical glue",
some historical anecdotes, etc. The purpose of introducing the
new unit of Q was not to go ahead and use it; it was to emphasize
the arbitrary nature of k, to facilitate the acceptance of k, and of
epsilon_zero.
No I am not trying to introduce "a new unit of current, perhaps
the Armageddon, defined to be one Satan per second?" and I
know that in the SI Amp comes before Coul. But in teaching,
as it is practiced today, Coul comes before Amp and a teacher
has to deal with it. In principle this does not matter, as long as
all is self-consistant. But to those who learn the subject for the
first time the coulomb has to be introduced somehow (without
borrowing from the future). In the SI Amp was defined first
because it can be measured more accurately than Coul, not
because it is conceptually easier to teach electrodynamics
before electrostatics.
John Denker wrote (toward the end):
Einstein said a theory should be as simple as possible, but
not simpler.
How do you define simplicity, John? Does it have anything
to do with the "easy to learn" aspect of elementary physics?
Ludwik Kowalski