thanks for the following:

This is what I like about Americans, they are taught to think.

I wish it were true; we seem to have been subjected to an anti-thinking agenda in our public schools over last 20 years.

And critical thinking was never a focus in our teaching to begin with,

I think instead that there is a great deal of stubbornness at a cultural level that lends itself to critical thinking, if nothing else to spit in the faces of our self-proclaimed "elites", to mock and ridicule their rent-seeking and their failed policy. That resistance to unearned authority leads to critical thinking.