I suspect that negative connotation has come to be, due to a combination of factors:

1. With the technology we have available, many people have access to a nearly unlimited amount of information, via the internet. Not everyone tries to learn something new every day. Some people try to not learn anything at all. For the majority of people, ignorance is now a choice, and not simply the result of a lack of available information.

2. Private education companies (both the ones that design standardized tests, and the ones that write the textbooks) are NOT helping the issue. No (read: Every) Child Left Behind made it easy for school boards to force teachers to only teach what's important for the next test, most of which is promptly forgotten by the day after the test. Hell, many kids aren't taught to think critically any longer. They can memorize facts, but often they don't understand the significance of those facts. Though it often doesn't matter to them - since they'll forget what they learned right after the test. Since funding for districts is based on these standardized tests, the kids and teachers both lose out in the long run, and the education companies make a killing regardless. It's a terrible mess, and often, the teachers are the ones who unfairly take the most heat for it. I'm not going to suggest that every teacher is wonderful here...just that many do the best they can, while their hands are half-tied. The smart kids can't excel at their desired level/speed, everyone gets a lower standard of education, and the slowest kids get pushed ahead anyway, further lowering the overall standards.

3. There are people who (at times on religious grounds) denounce science (and by extension history,) as inconvenient. Because in their minds, faith trumps facts, or more to the point, money trumps facts. I acknowledge that not all religious people feel this way, and that the people I mention are a minority, albeit a very vocal one. For a recent example, see the comments made earlier this year regarding "legitimate rape". It's an extreme example, but quite ignorant of someone whose job it is to help determine budgets for science research and education.

4. When these types of people are on school boards, they do things like try to remove any mention of "slavery" from the history textbook, and change all such references to "triangular trade". While it's factually correct, it's completely ignoring what one of those...commodities was, and leaving out one of the major causes for the US Civil War. Same goes for the easily deconstructed "States Rights" argument. One of those rights was for slavers to not head into free states while chasing after escaped/freed slaves. Hooray for revisionist history.

4. Similarly, there are certain politicians who run for office (Sarah Palin being a perfect example) that actively discourage people from learning, insinuate that intellectual people are not to be trusted, and push revisionist history as fact. Once again, because the facts are inconvenient to their goals. Check her comments mocking the funding of fruit fly research; one of the many possible benefits of that research could be a cure for Down Syndrome. It stands to reason she'd want to support that, and not suggest the project's funds should be allocated elsewhere...but that's what she wanted.

What do these factors leave us with? People who aren't simply ignorant in the sense of being uninformed, but willfully ignorant. Because willfully ignorant people are more likely to respond to fear-based politics, they are also much easier to manipulate, even to the point of getting them to vote against their own interests.

I'm not fabricating anything here. During the health care reform debate in the US a few years ago, insurance companies paid to bus numerous senior citizens, with their Medicare-paid for scooters, to anti-reform rallies where they held signs reading, "Keep your government hands off our Medicare!" Never mind the fact that Medicare is government run, they were there acting against their own interests, in part because someone told them the government was forming "death panels." (Side note: "death panels" was a term coined for what was nothing other than being able to talk to your doctor about potential end of life care, and send the bill for the consultation to your insurance company.) These people were easily manipulated, because they were ignorant, and didn't have to be so.

Because of all of the above, I don't have to wonder why the connotation is negative. I just wish it wasn't so prevalent. Sorry for the rant, as this subject hits home for me.