Critical thinking is such a nebulous term there's not even an agreed-upon way of measuring it, much less old tests of it to compare against. It's largely been used by the educational establishment to justify why students come out of 13 years of compulsory schooling functionally innumerate and illiterate. Oh sure they don't know anything, but their critical thinking skills are off the charts!

If we use the slightly better-defined term of problem solving skills, there's no worse way of teaching that than putting a teacher up in front of 20 students teaching a standardised curriculum and giving out standardised tests. In the CS context, most students first learn how to think through a problem when they learn to code. What were they doing in school? Certainly not thinking through problems.

Edit: Also you completely misunderstood the import of those two questions. Anyone with a passing familiarity with world literature can answer the Dostoyevsky question, and anyone with a passing familiarity with geography or Russian history can answer the Urals question. You're note supposed to memorise the answer, the answer comes naturally if you're not pig-ignorant about the world. I wouldn't expect most students to know them, I sure as hell would expect more than 0.00% to know them. Kids know nothing because schools imbed extreme anti-intellectualism into even the brightest of kids.