I have never taught at any level without separating the field from the
force. While the mathematics of fields is complex, the concept of a
field is quite manageable and quite essential, and even fascinating. The
experiments give you a force law a la Cavendish. But you can separate
that force law into two pieces, the part that depends on the body
feeling the force and everything else that depends on the source and the
geometry (distance essentially).
The key concept, which can be communicated at any level, is that the
source creates something in the space around it, something that is there
even when there is no test body to feel a force. And, while it seems
like it is only some mathematical abstraction that is at all the points
around the source, modern physics has shown conclusively that such
weightless, invisible things, really carry momentum and energy and even
spin. In particular, experiment shows that for very fast moving bodies
the force is not an instantaneous communication between two bodies like
a contact push, but that it takes time to get from the source to the
test body. The test body reacts instantaneously only to something at its
immediate location. It is that this is created by the source body, and
we call it gravity or the electric field. SOmetimes you can even see it,
if it happens to be an electro-magnetic disturbance oscillating at the
right band of frequencies.
Force is created by the interaction of charges with fields. The source
body alone cannot create force.
J. Epstein