Most likely if you had no names on the list and the teacher came back and had heard noises from outside the door you would receive the punishment

I do vaguely remember "good kings" and "bad kings" ... some kids were forgiving and more than fair, and others were vindictive. So not everyone gravitated towards tyranny and some did report "nothing happened" more or less.

It could be viewed as egoism though, when at specific angles. What win is? That everyone chit-chats instead of learning on a regular basis? Is your teacher a foe? You make friends of who?

It is hard to define a long-term win. In my story above we two refused our position not because we didn't like to create homeworks. In fact, what we did wasn't much different from school books; we even categorized tasks and watched that they weren't too hard, leaving only a couple of pieces that required some thinking. What we didn't like was scoring our friends, non-friends and whatever these relationships were back then. But still I think that seeing how they learn and provide a feedback is, well, a slightly better than just throwing books at them and wait for a success. Our class actually knew some physics as a result. It is a social price that was questionable, not a learning process. Despite being viewed as a 'good guy', now I don't have strong relationships with any of my then buddies anyway. Sum up? Our teacher could be not as unthoughtful as it seemed.

tl;dr while everyone is on their own, someone has to think of the group as a whole. It doesn't mean you all end up in a better place, but at least you tried and had an opinion instead of a denial. People are pretty forgiving if your intents are good-natured.