I, personally think teaching kids critical thinking is great. Here in Eastern Europe they are only taught useless facts and not to think too much on their own, remnant of the past I guess...
Eh you require a lot of factual knowledge to know how to think. I mean humanity has been pretty smart for the last 10k years or so, but without understanding of scientific laws and a massive amount of world knowledge breakthroughs were very slow compared to the last 300 or so years. We need these facts + philosophy + critical thinking, but it seems like no one knows how to teach this.