I'm not sure that's the game plan here. The closest I can think of would be analytical reasoning and iteration. Perhaps schools are teaching those well, but I don't think they're transferable to critical thinking regardless. Critical thinking is more about a reasonable standard of rationality even if you aren't in your domain of experience.

By "critical-everything" I'm talking about "critical" theories, or "Critical Theory". Aka the lenses people put on that makes them see everything as some sort of struggle due to power structures. A fun thought experiment that's worthy of exploration, but a side quest, not something that should be front and center in a child's education.

Critical thinking would lead one to understanding how arrogant and historically illiterate this claim is.

The reason the US has some science/invention advantages is a lot more complicated than:

> white people randomly woke up one day and decided to be like more brain-think while everybody else sat around doing nothing all day like a bunch of dum-dums.