In high school, most studio art classes have a lot less time devoted to verbal learning or whatever and much more to practice.

That's the point. Setting up real experiments is scientific practice.

Chemistry (especially with modern-day, possibly excessive safety consciousness) is not, and requires more specialized space and has a hard time admitting of experimental design by students because they might design a bad experiment.

I don't really see the point of most chemistry experiments that I did in school and university. The last batch at a university introductionary chemistry course just showed me that my finger coordination was really bad. Afterwards I learned some card magic to get finger coordination.