The School Strike 4 Climate NZ campaign has had a bit of scope creep: it's about Palestine, honouring the Treaty, lowering the voting age, and changing the weather. Their activists now wear the garb of Palestinian freedom fighters, as does their parliamentary wing the Green Party.
The term "scope creep" can be used lightly here, because these are the same issues. They're all as fake as each other and based in the same philosophy that underpins the education system.
ACT's criticism of the strike is that it is a form of truancy which harms children's education, and they'd be better off in the classrooms. However this completely ignores that this behaviour is promulgated from the classroom. They are behaving according to their education.
While we often see "critical race theory" criticised, few point to the source of "critical pedagogy" as promulgated by Paulo Freire that now forms the core of education across the western world, heavily influenced by the earlier philosophies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx.
Modern education is now about awakening a social consciousness in children so that they can engage in class, race, and gender activism. This is Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" where children are "liberated" to overthrow the "oppressed" (i.e. the sane and normal social order).
This is why protesting about the weather is the same as protesting against the democratic will of the majority in New Zealand or the settlement project of the Israelis. It is merely the liberated seeking to overthrow their oppressors as the core social value taught by the public education system.
ACT is simply wrong to argue that these kids would be better off in school with the way the education system is set up at the moment. The children being at school is a primary cause of the problem.
If education was a serious issue for the coalition government, they would not have put the left-wing minister Erika Standford in charge of it.
In 2019 she supported the SS4CNZ strikes, despite opposition from her party leader and many other National MPs. She argued that National should work with the Green Party, if the Greens "could just relax a little bit … they could do so much good."
Stanford says that her blood is "a tealy blue" and she's voted progressively on every social issue. Undoing the subversion of the education system by far left extremists is one of the most important issues to fix if the country is to survive in a recognisable way. Which is of course why the coalition government put someone who agrees with the basic principles of the left-wing revolution in charge of it.
Being charitable then, the biggest problem with the education system in New Zealand is that no one in the coalition government truly understands what the problem is.