Before the days of time-sucking TVs and you-need-this prolific advertising and anything-anywhere-now product availability, people spent a lot of their time doing what they could with what they had. Radios out of scrap wire & fragmentary parts, goofy vehicles from whatever rods & panels available, toys from broken widgets, etc. "Lifehacking" was the norm. "Recycling" wasn't a different-colored trash bin, it was repurposing every part of everything conceivable; even food waste was turned into quality dirt. When a plane crashed near my great-grandparent's farm, they hauled the whole thing back to the farm and used every part of it. Partly out of frugal economic necessity, partly out of limited product availability, partly out of sheer raging boredom.

It's not so much that your teachers were crazy imaginative, it's that most people today are so freaking lazy and rich (while claiming overwork & poverty).